


That's Nice, Device!

by Shampain



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Dark Comedy, Established Relationship, F/M, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Other, Recreational Drug Use, Weddings, a lot of playing around with gender, ancient family curse, but everyone already knows you're a couple, coming out as a couple, inconvenient friendships with your significant other's coworker, relationships where you have sex but can't say 'i love you'
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-07 09:14:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 30,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20307058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shampain/pseuds/Shampain
Summary: It's been nearly four years since the Apocalypse was averted, and life is stranger than ever. For one, Crowley has accidentally befriended Gabriel when he wasn't paying attention. Second, Anathema and Newt are finally tying the knot and everyone is invited -everyone. Third, and most importantly, evil is lurking in the background of a sweet, beautiful summer, and it's due to present itself on the very eve of the festivities.As in all things, there's nothing quite like a wedding and/or mortal danger to bring everyone together.





	1. the devil wears prada, sometimes

It was an accident.

No, no, that wasn’t right. It was more than that. An accident was something that wasn’t supposed to happen, _happening_, with no one at fault. And in all things, Crowley was very confident in laying the blame elsewhere and, if the archangel happened to be around, Gabriel especially.

It had been nearly three years after the whole debacle with Not Armageddon, and Crowley was shopping in his favourite district in Rome. Normally, when Crowley went shopping to look at and try things on, he never purchased them. It’s not that he stole them, but the shopping was merely so he could get an idea of the real thing and then miracle it into being – because if there was one thing Crowley made sure of it was that everything he wore could be traced back to a fashion designer somehow. If not, then what was the damn point? If Crowley wanted to wear Chanel, he wore Chanel, and everyone needed to know it.

But miracles were few and far between these days, seeing as how he was somewhat cut off from Hell. Money was now the name of the game, which was fine by him. The human persona Crowley had cultivated out of boredom and convenience ended up making a lot of money – apparently, signing a bunch of documents with his bank account attached to it in the Fifties had done a lot of good. The account operated quite normally while he had ignored it, and he saw when looking it over that his investments had paid off, royally, and he was one of the UK’s top secret millionaires. Inflation had also been kind. He’d been truly surprised: of the pair of them he figured Aziraphale would be the wealthy one, seeing as he had an actual business. Then again, it’s not like Aziraphale did very much of that. Business.

Today was a day where Crowley was leaning more towards Gucci than Pucci, and he hadn’t breathed in the clean, luminous air of a shop in over a year. So while Aziraphale was off being a Good Samaritan or whatever, Crowley had decided to nip to Rome. He was in one of his old haunts, admiring a lethal-looking black coat, when an all too familiar voice sounded behind him.

All too familiar, and all too close. “Have you ever considered another colour palette?”

Crowley had nearly jumped out of his skin. He was shocked, unnerved, possibly a bit drunk from his several cocktails at lunch. When he opened his mouth, perhaps the worst retort in the history of retorts came out. “Uh. Have _you_?”

To which the Archangel Gabriel, clad as he was in soft shades of grey and cream, appeared to give serious thought. “Once or twice,” he admitted. “What would you suggest?”

The interesting thing about Gabriel was he was ridiculously fashionable, something that Crowley was unaccustomed to in angels. Mostly because the only angel he knew wasn’t… well, Aziraphale was _stylish_, in his own way, and Crowley loved it, but when it came to being modern and new and experimental his angel was not quite so well-versed.

Crowley had assumed that was the same of everyone in Heaven, until he really got a good _look_ at Gabriel out at the Tadfield air base. In Heaven, as in Hell, celestial and occult beings tended to take on certain spiritual forms. Transferring to earth meant wearing a body, as well as being responsible for clothing and maintaining said body however you chose. And Gabriel just took it to the next damn level.

So, yes, that was the one interesting thing about Gabriel. And the one irritating thing about Gabriel was _literally everything else about Gabriel_. So that was great.

That entire afternoon, Crowley thought he was going crazy. It _couldn’t_ have been real, right? He couldn’t have spent the last two hours arguing over cashmere sweaters with Archangel Gabriel, literally That Guy, who not only tried to sentence your-boyfriend-but-actually-you (ack) to death but also had really terrible taste in light reading (self-help books, honestly?). That could not have actually happened. He had definitely not threatened to set Gabriel on fire if he did not buy himself a new pair of Armani shoes.

(But really, Crowley reflected, if there was one asshole in the world who could pull off that stupid sharky-businessman-in-leather-sneakers look, it was Gabriel. It was a look Crowley had always wanted to try but he knew he did not have the right attitude to pull off. So really if Gabriel didn’t take advantage of what he had t-... aw, shit, yeah, it had all definitely happened.)

And not only that but Crowley had been tricked into purchasing the sort of cozy, baggy, wide-necked, beatnik-esque sweater he would have happily worn otherwise in his more casual moments, were it not in a colour closer to purple than black. Crowley had chucked it in the closet, only for Aziraphale to find it, convince Crowley to wear it on their date night, and for it to end in them fucking in the back of the Bentley because Aziraphale had not been able to wait until they got home. So maybe Gabriel giving his opinion on Crowley’s clothes wasn’t quite so dire.

After that it just started _happening_. They discussed clothes and fashion and nothing else – literally, nothing else. They had spirited arguments about mixing patterns, and whether or not navy was a terrible colour. It somehow made the reality easier to deal with, as in, Crowley found reality easier to ignore.

If Gabriel was feeling just as weirded out and confused as Crowley was, well, he didn’t show it. Or was it all an act, a way to keep tabs on the two creatures who had averted the Apocalypse? Crowley was beginning to figure out that the archangel used bad acting to cover up the fact he was actually a very _good_ actor, someone who was a lot smarter than he wanted you to think, but still with enough blinders on stopping him from being as smart as he _could_ be.

Yet despite all that, the three Big A’s – Aziraphale, Adam, and the Apocalypse – never came up. Suspicious or normal? He asked Aziraphale after the first meeting, but his angel had not been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation once he had gotten over the fact Crowley had gone shopping with his murderous ex-supervisor. And, unfortunately, despite everything, Aziraphale’s kind and forgiving nature meant that his opinion was a little too gentle for Crowley’s liking. “Perhaps he’s just moved on,” Aziraphale suggested. “Gabriel never liked to dwell on mistakes, especially his own; he’d rather pretend it didn’t happen. Besides, he’s not so bad. He was always very supportive of my work.”

“He tried to have us killed,” Crowley reminded him.

“Oh, that was ages back.”

“Three years!”

“Then why do you enjoy helping him pick out shirts so much,” Aziraphale had asked, with the sort of idle tone that meant he was taking the piss while pretending to be lovely. Crowley had not been able to come up with a good enough counter argument, so in a huff he’d kissed his angel instead to shut him up.

But still that’s all it was: shopping. It never went beyond anything like that. They simply used each other as sounding boards. Crowley began to convince Gabriel to adopt a sleeker style; Gabriel wrangled Crowley into the sort of soft-looking outfits that made Aziraphale handsier than usual. And everything was fine, in a weirdly normal way, until the damn wedding invitation came in the mail.

.

It might have comforted Crowley to know that the events currently transpiring were simply the stepping stones leading up to something very important, but more likely he would have just been disturbed even further.

In her parent's airy home in California, Anathema was writing. Nothing of interest. Just addresses.

Newt, bless him, had finally conquered the expensive coffee machine and set a fresh latte down beside her. “Thanks,” she said, without looking up, and he touched her shoulder as he passed behind her. Anathema was not physically affectionate much of the time. She'd tried, but it just wasn't her. She did not like walking around holding hands. She didn't like cuddling – when it came to watching TV with Newt on the couch, she was always sitting a bit further from him, but would usually have her legs up on his lap. She liked connection and contact, but needed space. She'd thought, upon experiencing Newt for the first time – uncertain, somewhat needy – it would spell death to whatever kind of relationship they were having.

It did not. In fact, it flourished. There might have been something in the Manuscript about that, but she'd never know: it was all ash now.

Well, she'd never know but she might _know_, later on, as it turned out. She wrote down another address. Most of the time she consulted the gigantic address book her family kept, but sometimes the location just came to her, unbidden, as she wrote. Newt sat down across from her and began heating the sealing wax, since there were now enough envelopes for him to begin sorting out the invitations and RSVPs. “Are you sure I'm good to handle this?” he asked, doubtfully, looking at the hand-carved stamp, courtesy of her great grandmother in Mexico.

“Sure,” she said, handling the fountain pen with ease, adding a few nice swoops and whorls to the names. “It's just a simple spell to make sure every invitation gets to where it's supposed to go.”

“I meant more the fact it's a family heirloom.”

She laughed. “It's fine, Newt.”

“If you say so.” He stuck an RSVP card and the right invitation into its envelope, added a few drops of green wax to the back, and sealed it.

Many of her guests, especially extended family, had long and complicated names. Some of her guests only had the one name, more important than all the other titles or monickers. She finished her current envelope, feeling a shiver of trepidation, and set it on the pile. _Gabriel_.

Anathema still wasn't sure what was happening, but she knew she needed to set these steps in motion. For good or bad, that was to be discovered later.

“This is a lot of invitations,” Newt remarked. He knew what was going on, of course. Newt knew everything.

“Yep.”

“Anathema...”

“_Newt_.”

“Okay, just, listen. Are you _sure_?”

“You're going to ask again before we drop all these off at the post office, aren't you?” Anathema replied. “I'll just answer you when we go to do that. And, by the way, the answer will still be _yes_.”

“I won't ask again,” he promised, and he didn't. It took them the better part of the afternoon, by which point her elderly grandmother came in, saw that they weren't eating, and immediately began to make them soup.

The next day they went to the post office. Newt was going through the envelopes. “I'm really more concerned about the catering, if I'm going to be honest,” he said, in his not-honest-at-all voice, trying to tease a smile out of her. “Isn't this the person who came out of the ground at the airbase? What do lords of Hell eat?”

“Sandwiches, probably,” Anathema said. Helping organize the envelopes on the counter, Anathema felt a flicker of pain and jerked her hand back. Newt glanced up.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, paper cut,” Anathema said, looking at her fingertip. It was not like most paper cuts, though, that were just a slice into the skin – not enough damage for it to bleed unless she forced it. But as she looked, blood was welling up all the same.

A dab of it had made it onto the envelope that had nicked her. She looked at where it was going, sighed, and then just let it go, on its way to Soho. For better, or worse. Sickness or death.

_The Device and Pulsifer Families would like to invite you to witness the union of_

_Anathema and Newt_

_on Saturday the thirty-first of August_

_at one o'clock in the afternoon _

_at the Ruby Family Winery and Vineyard_

_Reception and Party to follow_

_Formal attire appreciated, but not required_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, everyone, I don't even really know what I'm doing right now. But if you like you can stick around and enjoy the madness, though, because _there will be madness_.
> 
> Expect more tags, relationships, and characters to be added as the story evolves. I've kept it at a Mature rating to be safe; it may end up as Teen or, alternatively, Explicit. Sorry, I don't really know what's going on so I can't tell you for sure. Kind of like most aspects of my life.


	2. by invitation only

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The invites roll out, and a few long-buried things begin to wake up.

The invitations arrived slowly. Some of them had to go very far to get to where they needed to be. Some, not far at all.

In a gleaming apartment building in Mexico City, the doorman looked up as one of the tenants entered. The building was filled with mainly expats, who were sometimes gone for long periods, but this man's comings and goings were the most unusual and difficult to trace of them all.

“Señor Clarion,” Javier said, as he entered. “I believe some mail has arrived for you.”

Clarion came forward, looking amused. “You _believe_, Javier?”

“It only has your first name,” Javier explained, handing the envelope over.

Clarion looked at it for a moment, seeming confused; then nodded. “Gracias, Javier,” he said, before asking politely how his mother was doing.

.

Aziraphale was going through the mail when the envelope caught his eye – it was of a much heavier and finer texture than the bills, though it did appear a bit battered. Aziraphale knew a wedding invitation when he saw one – he'd been invited to countless weddings, in his time – but even still he had to smile a bit to see that that wild young couple was finally settling down.

He called Crowley.

“Yuh?” Crowley asked, not even bothering to finish his word.

“I just received an invitation in the mail. Have you?”

“Dunno. Don't check the mail.”

“Crowley!”

“Oh, very well,” the demon replied, and Aziraphale imagined him levering his absurdly long, lean body out of his desk chair to saunter over to the front door. “Yeah, there is something, hold on-” a quiet rustling sound as Crowley pushed the phone between his shoulder and face while he opened the envelope, “-yup, there it is. _Mr A. J. Crowley, the Device and Pulsifer Families_-”

“Yes, I thought as much,” Aziraphale said, pleased. The invitation, after all, had not mentioned a plus one, and he wouldn't dream of going to see darling Anathema without Crowley.

“Bloody hell, it's in _America_,” Crowley snorted, still clearly glaring at the invitation. “That's rubbish, I don't want to go there.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said. “California.”

“Perhaps we could say that we're busy then-”

“Read the invitation again, dear,” Aziraphale said.

A few seconds later, once he had actually read the bit where the reception was being held at a winery, Crowley said, “So I'll book the tickets, then?”

.

Harriet Dowling, sitting at the kitchen table in her home in London, blinked at the unfamiliar names on the wedding invitation in her hand. When Tad called her just after dinner – and after he had spoken to Warlock – she had settled in the front room with a glass of wine in hand and asked him if he knew who the Devices or Pulsifers were.

“Where's the wedding?” Tad asked.

“Some vineyard in California,” Harriet replied.

“Hmmmm.” She sipped her wine as her husband seemed to think it over. She had a feeling he had taken the phone away from his face for a moment to google 'Device' or 'Pulsifer'. “Ah! You know what, honey, I do. Those are the tech investors, the Devices. Pretty sure I've run into them a few times.”

“Well that explains it,” she said. “What do you think? Because I thought, you know, it's been awhile since we had an American holiday. We could go out for a few weeks for Warlock's summer vacation, make it more of a trip?”

“I think that's a fine idea,” Tad said. “I'll look into it.”

After hanging up and settling in to read the new Ruth Ware, there was a thump from upstairs, in the vicinity of her son's bedroom. Harriet glanced up at the ceiling suspiciously, but no other noise came. Honestly, teenage boys were the strangest creatures.

.

It was Friday. Pepper rushed through her math homework – her mother wouldn't release her from the house unless she had the homework of at least one subject completed – then left it scattered on her bed before heading downstairs.

“Dinner at six!” her mother called, as Pepper sped out.

She pulled her coat on against the February chill and began to walk briskly towards the cafe. Brian had just texted her that Adam had news on Anathema, and Pepper knew it was only a matter of time before they'd stop waiting and get started without her.

“Mum got the invite this morning,” Adam was saying as Pepper dropped herself in the spare chair at the table.

“I always thought she could do better than Newt,” she said, unwinding her scarf.

“Oi!” Brian said, laughing. “Don't slag off Newt.”

“I wasn't! I just meant comparatively.”

None of them had seen Newt or Anathema since they were eleven, but they had left a lasting impression. Averting the Apocalypse could do that, Pepper found. Also, Anathema was the very picture of what Pepper admired in adult women: independent, strong, beautiful, and full of sorcery, apparently. “So are you going to go?” Pepper asked.

“Doubt it,” Adam said. “Dad says it's too far. They're in California.”

“Shame,” Wensleydale sighed.

They were, of course, entirely unaware of the fact that all of the parents were to receive an invitation; the remaining three would arrive on Monday, thanks to a trick of the post office. Once that began, things would start to change. One family going to California, after all, was a headache; four sets of adults going, trailing their children behind them, was more like a party that married couples could incorrectly perceive as an actual holiday. It just so happened that promotions would occur, late bonuses would arrive, and old investments would start up again just in time for sets of plane tickets to be booked. None of the parents actually knew Anathema or Newt that well, save for Deirdre, who had appreciated Anathema taking an interest in Adam.

But that didn't seem to matter. A wedding in California was just an excuse to book a wine tasting tour, as far as the adults of Tadfield were concerned.

.

Madame Tracy, of course, also received an invitation, but she wasn't surprised by it at all and had, in fact, already planned and budgeted for the trip. Newt had telephoned after he had popped the question, and though Mr Shadwell had been rather displeased that his former recruit had finally succumbed to the darkness, as it were, Tracy had been overjoyed and confirmed they were both happy to attend.

It was to be a lovely, boring, very normal ceremony, Newt told her. The extended family was a mash of different spiritual paths and religions, and really the only important bit was that there was going to be enough alcohol at the reception, and the cake needed to be strawberry.

“Will you be inviting Mr Aziraphale and Mr Crowley?” Tracy had asked.

“Anathema insists on it,” Newt said. There was an edge to his voice. Jealousy, perhaps? Oh, he really needn't have bothered. Madame Tracy knew a pair of lovers when she saw one. “So we'll see if they come.”

“Oh, Mr Aziraphale will, he's all about love, if I remember correctly,” Tracy said, as she had not spoken to either of them since that summer. “Now, Newt, bit of a time difference here; I've got to get dinner on so I've got to let you go. But congratulations, love.”

.

Plans were made. Time off requests were applied for, and accepted. The slow hand of destiny began its first push.

Months later, in May, Anathema woke gasping at three fifty-six in the morning. Her mouth tasted like blood. From the dream, perhaps, she thought sluggishly, as Newt seemed to be talking to her from very far away, shaking her slightly.

“Anathema?” he asked. “Can you hear me? Love, you've bit your tongue.”

Her hands found his face. “Newt?” she murmured.

“I'll get you some water. Stay here.”

“Newt,” she insisted, and he stilled. “Where are we?”

“Our place,” he said. She could heard the patience in his voice and she wanted to smile. “San Francisco.”

“Oh, right,” she murmured. “Good.” She didn't want her parents to know about this.

By the time he came back with some water and a damp towel for her face – she had blood on her chin, apparently – the dream had gone. It did not want to be remembered, which comforted Anathema slightly. Surely, if it had been a legitimate vision, it would have burned itself into her memory?

“What was it?” Newt asked.

She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said, rolling onto her side, pulling her long hair off the back of her neck and settling down to sleep again. He didn't believe her, she knew; and she didn't sleep.

.

It was June before it finally arrived. Its edges were rubbed soft from being passed hand to hand; an off, greasy substance had been thumbprinted on it at some point; part of the name was blurred by water damage. Yet still it was deposited in the mail tray, next to a memo, payroll requests, and draft of a speech to be read at the next employee award night. It laid there, victorious. Something from the surface had managed to make its way, somehow, to the basement.

Beelzebub picked it up. Immediately she smelt witchcraft and she brought the envelope to her nose, carefully, and inhaled. And remembered.

“Oh, I see,” she said, breaking the seal and sliding out the invite. Dagon hovered curiously in the doorway, having been the one to deposit the mail in the first place.

“What is it?” she asked.

Beelzebub rubbed her fingertips together, feeling a soft, invisible substance there; the remains of the spell. “Just an old job that hasn't been finished yet,” she said. She separated out the RSVP card, picked up her fountain pen, and began to fill it out. “Nothing to worry about.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes!  
-Beelzebub is genderfluid in this, and she will be referred to by both 'she/her' and 'they/their' pronouns by various characters, which suits her just fine.  
-A clarion is a trumpet, and a reference to some biblical myths stating Gabriel was to be the one to blow the horn to wake the dead on Judgment Day.  
-Newt is definitely not jealous, because anyone with eyes can see that Aziraphale and Crowley are head over heels for one another.
> 
> Also I'm vodkertonic on tumblr, so if you see me lurking about please say hi! <3


	3. el jarocho

Uriel was annoyed, because Gabriel had been right. If she called him, she risked him realizing; then again, if she didn’t call him she was going to end up trying to shut her head into her desk drawer. She dialled his number before she changed her mind.

“Yes?” he asked when he picked up. There were voices in the background and she heard him speaking in an aside, _Lo siento, Padre. Un momento._

“Where are you?” Uriel asked.

“Church,” Gabriel said. “So make it quick.”

Uriel resisted the urge to bite off an angry reply. She was stressed and wanted to unleash it on someone; now she was beginning to understand why Gabriel jogged, of all things. How else to burn off the rage of millions of angels not getting their job done? How had he been so sickeningly cheerful all the time in the face of all that ineptitude? Just run until your physical body wore out your celestial body, apparently.

Heaven had, naturally, restructured after the Not Apocalypse in order to figure out what had gone wrong. From what they could see in going back through the reports, it seemed most issues began to start about six centuries previous when Gabriel had been pulled from active duty and reassigned, spending most of his time behind a desk. It looked like they’d begun to lose track of their on-earth counterparts after that, which naturally led to the _fraternization_ with the other side and, possibly, a complete upheaval in the natural order, if Aziraphale resisting hellfire was anything to go by.

It was decided that Heaven needed someone to relocate to earth for the foreseeable future, possibly centuries, until they could figure out a solution moving forward. Someone with clout, in the upper echelons of management. Uriel had braced herself for a heated debate the likes of which Heaven had never before seen until Gabriel just straight up volunteered to do it. After that it was a case of rearranging roles, and Uriel ended up squarely in Gabriel’s position.

At first, she had been pleased. Over time occasions of smiting – which she was very good at – became less and less, which meant her responsibilities had dwindled as a result. So, taking on Gabriel’s responsibilities was a challenge she craved, and she’d figured it was about time they mixed up management anyway. It would be a piece of cake, as the humans would say.

Except it really wasn’t.

“This nonexistent report you claimed you are sending me,” she said. “I still don't have it.”

“Your point?”

She wished she could reach through the phone and slap him. If she was on earth she _could_ have manipulated molecules in order to do it, but alas, she was under the constraints of Heaven. “Michael is trying to micro-manage every single decision I make and I would _appreciate_ it if you could file your papers on time, you know, like you _used_ to.”

She expected another snippy reply, but instead when he spoke Gabriel’s voice had softened. Annoyingly, he’d figured out exactly what was bothering her. “I have full confidence in your leadership, Uriel, you know that,” he said.

“Yes, but-”

“And Michael did the exact same thing to me,” he continued. “That's his way.”

“Well he's in my office more than I am,” Uriel said. She’d told herself she was not going to complain about Michael to Gabriel, but now it was happening and she could not stop herself. “He’s constantly updating my calendar for me and I only get notifications for meetings five minutes before they start, he keeps reminding me of things I’m not meant to do for another three months, he went and recruited a team to rework the filing system to be more ‘intuitive’ and now everything keeps getting mislabelled because it’s somehow been _half_-implemented-”

Gabriel’s sudden laugh was so loud she had to move the phone away from her face. “Well _thanks_,” she said, moodily. He wasn’t listening, though; she could hear him attempting to placate the no-doubt scandalized priest he was with. Laughing in church, definitely frowned upon. If only the priest knew just _who_ he was talking to.

Eventually, he calmed down. “Uriel?” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh. But I _did_ warn you. You're going to have to deal with more stress than usual until I'm done down here.”

Which, as they both knew, might take awhile. “Yes,” she sighed. “Well. What do you suggest?”

“Look, I spent the last three decades of the thirteenth century doing my best not to murder anyone,” he said. This was typical Gabriel: optimistic, supportive, comforting. There was a reason he was known as the office hugger. It used to drive Uriel crazy, but now she found herself in need of it. She was glad he wasn’t enough of an asshole to rub it in. “You’ll hit your groove eventually. But I suggest a hobby.”

“A _hobby_,” she repeated. “I’m not going to take up jogging. I’d rather throw myself into the pits of Hell.”

“Wine making, then,” he said. She couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. When she huffed he added, “Uriel, you'll get my report when it is _complete_, not when Michael thinks it should be due, as per our agreements. As for getting him off your back, use him to put the fear of... the fear of _Michael_ into any misbehaving angels. Reassign him. He loves lording it over the Cherubim. Just make sure he thinks it’s his idea.”

.

Beelzebub liked Mexico City almost as much as she liked Bangkok, where she preferred to go. The issue with Mexico, of course, was the amount of Catholic iconography; she much preferred the Buddhist temples over the soaring churches. For one, she could walk right into temples. Here, though, she had to wait outside.

She stood in Zócalo, facing the ancient church, its two centuries worth of architecture glowing in the half-light. She did not have long to wait before she saw the familiar figure of Gabriel walking down the steps, his clothes in various shades of soft white-blue that were reminiscent of a cold winter sky. He didn't seem surprised to see her there.

“How _is_ Mary?” Beelzebub asked, with a smirk. Her face was everywhere here, of course, but naturally her divinity was centre stage in a building humbly named Catedral Metropolitana de la Asunción de la Santísima Virgen María a los Cielos.

“Heavenly,” Gabriel said, without missing a beat. He bent down so that they could exchange cheek kisses, customary for where they were – though they did not embrace – and as one they turned and headed down the 5 de Febrero, blending in with the rest of the tourists.

He didn't question what she was doing there, even though this meeting had not been planned; she had sought him out on her own time. Over the past few centuries, as they had drifted apart – less angelic and demonic activity on earth meant the respective retreat into their offices – they did not speak or argue as freely as they once did. But walking with him among humans was familiar enough that it could never be awkward. They had walked together, on and off, for several millennia.

Unfortunately it was Beelzebub's craving for those 'good old days' that had started this mess, but now that she was in it her demonic nature forced her to continue. That's what she figured, anyway. Surely, she just couldn't help herself.

“It's going to rain soon,” Beelzebub stated, glancing up at the overcast sky.

“El Jarocho?” he suggested. She nodded.

The modest on-street coffee shop, in the midst of the not-unusual rain, still did roaring business even with a good portion of its seating area unprotected. Beelzebub and Gabriel spoke in Spanish, to better be ignored by everyone else around them; and the sound of the rain hitting the awning and coming down in a deluge all around them further drowned out the specifics of their talk. Even so, Gabriel's well-dressed figure next to Beelzebub's shorter, thinner frame in skinny jeans and a t-shirt were beginning to be familiar sights to the employees, who had begun to remember their coffee orders.

Beelzebub's coffee was dark, creamy, and sweet. At her insistence Gabriel had one as well, though with far less sugar. She viewed it as a temporary victory against him, as if every interaction with him was a fight, one where she needed the upper hand at all times. She shifted a bit in her chair – it was easy to commandeer a table when you were an angel or a demon, even in a place as busy as El Jarocho – and moved close enough so that under the table she could hook her toe around the back of Gabriel's calf. She watched him sip his coffee, making no outward sign of noticing, with some amusement.

“So what did you need to talk about?” he asked.

“I've no idea what you mean,” she said, dryly.

“Oh, I see,” Gabriel said, nodding solemnly. “You're just stalking me for selfless reasons.”

“Maybe I just wanted company. And anyway, you can't stalk archangels. You're like walking beacons.”

He looked amused. “Are you speaking in tongues again?”

Officially, there was only one reason for Beelzebub to seek him out: business. Unofficially there was another reason, one that involved less clothing, which neither of them had any intention in mentioning to Heaven or Hell. But as of late Beelzebub found herself considering a third reason, one which she had no interest in saying out loud or even fully admitting to in private. Better to just file it all under 'verbal foreplay', she reasoned.

She scowled at him, then dragged her foot up the back of his leg. This time he shifted, a bit sharply, and her scowl turned into a smile.

“Well if it's company you want, Frida's house is around the corner,” he said, idly. “I wouldn't mind accompanying you. Her gardens are quite lovely in the rain.”

“Nah, it's not the same without her rolling around,” Beelzebub sighed.

“How is she these days, anyway?”

“She's painting Dagon. All thirty hands, all sixteen beaks.”

“That will take some time.”

“She's got all the time in the world, which is a lot now, as it turns out,” Beelzebub said, draining her coffee. The longer they lingered, the closer he would get to figuring out that she enjoyed his company in more ways than the physical, and she couldn't have that. “Come on. Take me home.”

‘Home’ was an apartment Gabriel had acquired about a year back. She didn’t know if he got it because he wanted a base of operations for his work, or because she was starting to visit him so much it was easier to have a place with a bed. Either way she was pleased, as she preferred it to the hotels, cars, and (only twice) back alleys.

She was stretched out on the bed, watching him from underneath her eyelashes as he made his way up her stomach, lips and tip of his nose barely brushing the skin. He pushed her shirt up higher, exposing more and more of her.

She reached out, gently tracing her fingertips up his bicep, over his shoulders, tracking by sight and touch the firm curve and swoop of his muscles, the odd freckle here and there, the ridge of his collarbone. She dropped her hand and hummed in pleasure when he pressed his mouth to the bony spot between her breasts, and she raised her arms to help him in getting the shirt off.

Tossing the clothing away, she pulled him close, dragging her nails over the back of his neck. “Kiss me,” she demanded, with what was almost a pout. He grinned, but less than a second later he was kissing her, hungrily, and she smirked into it before parting her lips. Neither of them were very good about taking their time just yet; they didn't mess around. Not only that but it had been a stressful week for Beelzebub, and she tended to take it out on him during her desperate attempts to unwind, becoming rough and demanding and taking whatever she could from him as quickly as possible.

Less than fifteen minutes later she had her face buried in the crook of his neck, inhaling his scent, for the moment comfortably pinned against the bed as he stretched out on top of her in post-coital repose. Gabriel wore, without irony, Chanel No. 5, and after sex it had begun to take on such an ethereal quality that Beelzebub found herself craving the scent in her lonelier moments.

She'd lost count of how many times she had gone to him now. At first, she kept telling herself she was finished with him. _This is the last time_, she'd promised herself, grabbing his tie and dragging his mouth down to hers. That had been the third time, it had _not_ been the last time, and she had stopped counting once she passed a dozen trysts. They never talked about it; it was just something they did.

Beelzebub gave his shoulder a bit of a slap and he obediently rolled off. She slid out of bed, getting to her feet, raising her arms in a stretch, enjoying the feeling of his eyes on her. As a demon she could spot vice straight away; she opened a dresser drawer and rifled through for a moment, before coming up with a half-full pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “You need to find better hiding places,” she said.

“I see that,” he remarked, dryly, pulling the bedsheets up to his waist as he sat up. She wandered back to the bed, climbing on top of him, straddling his lap. “Well, I keep them there for you.”

“No you don't,” she disagreed, shaking a cigarette out and lighting up. “There are at least four missing since the last time I was here. Unless you've been inviting other people over?”

There was a seriousness to that question she was not about to own up to, but his amused look was answer enough already. She wasn't surprised – Gabriel had never been particularly sexual, not until Armageddon hadn’t happened and she could no longer resist seducing him – but she was still pleased nonetheless. Beelzebub didn’t do _sharing_.

She took one of his hands and placed it to her waist. He began to stroke her sides, and she settled back, closing her eyes. It was soothing when he touched her like that; no hunger, only... something else. With one hand in his hair, she smoked while staring contemplatively at the ceiling.

She felt his lips on her neck. “What are you thinking about?” he asked, rubbing both hands up her back. She shivered appreciatively and felt herself relaxing even further. If she wasn't careful she would fall asleep against his chest.

“Nothing,” she said, truthfully. She scraped her nails against the back of his head, felt him murmur something in the vicinity of her throat. She pulled back from him slightly to give him the cigarette.

“Nothing?” he asked, taking a draw.

“Yeah,” she said, and trailed a fingertip down over his chest. “It's nice. Is this what it's like to be you all the time?”

“You are so fucking mean,” Gabriel laughed, and she grinned.

She understood Crowley. Really, she did. But she was angry with him too. Beelzebub had spent well over six millennia working with Gabriel, and _she_ had managed to keep her distance. Of course, things were different now. There technically wasn't a rule against fraternizing in such a way – there never had been, just aggressive, yet unofficial, proclamations to stay apart and keep everything professional.

_Professional_. This wasn't, but she didn't care anymore, and she knew she was not alone in feeling that way.

He shifted, moving to tap ash from the cigarette out into a tray that had materialized on the bedside table. But she reached over, running her fingertips down his arm and to the back of his hand, taking the cigarette and stubbing it out. He met her gaze as she shifted up onto her knees, so that she was looking down at him, and brushed her lips against his mouth.

Just like, that the tone between them changed, suddenly tense. The pad of his thumb smoothed over her palm, the edge of his nail catching against the skin. She shuddered and bit down on his lip.

He groaned into her mouth. “You like that?” she breathed.

“Harder,” he said.

They didn't talk much after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes:  
-The places mentioned in Mexico City (besides Gabriel's apartment) are real and I highly recommend hunting down El Jarocho if you're ever in the area. Go to the one by Frida Kahlo's house, make a day of it.  
-I am not a native Spanish speaker so many, many apologies if any Spanish in this fic is incorrect/awkwardly worded/etc.  
-The responses I've been getting to this fic make me so, so happy and I'm so glad people are enjoying it. Thank you so much for reading!!!


	4. angels don't do favours

Aziraphale had spent the last two days going over the accounts. He didn’t trust anyone else to look over them, mainly for the reason that if they did they would start asking questions, like ‘How have you managed to maintain a profit after all these years?’ or ‘According to the paperwork you have been the owner of this establishment for several centuries, is that even possible?’

He had never officially trained at accounting, but after a few hundred years of study and practical experience he was quite good at it. As a result, Aziraphale had been able to get quite thrifty over the years, though he never outright broke the law (naturally, that was against his nature). He was puzzling over some of the final numbers, because these days he had to actually think about things – before all he had to do was assume his store’s heating and electricity would operate as needed, normally, without him ever having to look at it. Now, money actually needed to be allocated for bills and maintenance.

There was no Crowley to tempt him from his work, because the demon had decided to take a few days to himself to check out the new bars and clubs that had sprung up in the past six months. This was nothing abnormal – they had, after all, spent thousands of years doing their own thing, separately, unaware of the emotions building up between them. Still, though, Aziraphale found himself experiencing a peculiar kind of emotion: missing someone. It was a sweet ache that promised an even better emotion when they were reunited, and the experience was oddly satisfying despite being uncomfortable.

With that in mind, he didn’t really expect to hear a rather spirited hammering noise at his front door at nearly two in the morning but, if it was Crowley, Aziraphale was going to find it difficult to get mad. And Crowley _was_ there on the street (still rather busy because it was, after all, Soho) waiting for him, but he was with Gabriel – the demon leaning precariously against the archangel’s shoulder, in fact.

“He couldn’t remember his address,” Gabriel said, frankly, just as Aziraphale was opening his mouth to ask what the Hell was going on. “He’s a bit drunk. I figured he’d be safer here than in the gutter.”

“Bit drunk? Bit _very_,” Crowley interrupted. He started to tilt in the direction of the road, but Gabriel grabbed the back of his jacket and held on, so Crowley just ended up dangling there at an angle, looking confused.

Aziraphale didn't realize he had just been standing there, staring in bemusement, until Gabriel said, “Aziraphale.”

He snapped back to himself, at least for a moment. “Oh, yes, of course, come in,” he said, stepping aside and allowing Gabriel to more or less _invade_ the territory of the bookshop. He had not let a single agent of Heaven cross the threshold for years and, while they hadn’t exactly been knocking on his door, he still felt like he was ceding land to a foreign enemy.

But, he reminded himself, Crowley had found common ground with the archangel, literally something Aziraphale never expected to happen. And while Aziraphale was not exactly close with Gabriel he’d worked with the archangel long enough to know that Gabriel didn’t do anything he just didn’t feel like doing, so in some capacity Gabriel actually enjoyed Crowley’s company. It made sense to Aziraphale, who had appreciated Crowley’s presence for thousands of years, and a part of him had actually felt a bit smug to see that his demon was, in fact, irresistible to everyone else, archangels included.

But perhaps he’d been too quick to assume the best. Now Gabriel was here, and taking up more space than Aziraphale remembered. And while they had done their best to set themselves up as impervious to Heaven and Hell’s punishments, what if Gabriel figured out the truth? What if he just _asked_? Aziraphale was a terrible liar.

“Through there,” he said, pointing the way to the back room, even though Gabriel certainly knew that already.

Crowley was deposited with little ceremony onto the sofa. “Ow,” the demon muttered. “Rude.”

“I’m a bit confused,” Aziraphale said, lightly, as Gabriel stepped back, avoiding a half-hearted kick from one of Crowley’s long legs. “How did this happen?”

“Apparently, the bartender couldn’t get a hold of you, and I was the first person to respond to a text,” the archangel said. “_Stop_ it,” he added, trying to grab hold of Crowley’s ankle when another kick came his way.

Aziraphale covered his mouth in shock. “Oh, dear,” he murmured. “I unhooked the phone. I was working.”

“Don’t you have a cell?” Gabriel asked, disbelieving.

Aziraphale tried not to scowl at his former superior. “Of course I do. I just… I don’t use it very often.”

“Yeah, but you’re supposed to turn it on,” Gabriel said, flatly. He had managed to get a firm hold of one of Crowley’s ankles and the demon gave up on his attacks, laying flat on his back, one leg stuck in the air, apparently confused as to how he got in such a position in the first place. Good lord, he really was a handful. There was a war going on inside of Aziraphale between the parts of him that were amused but also horribly embarrassed.

And something else, too a spike of an emotion Aziraphale had felt before, but sparsely enough that it surprised him just then. Jealousy. _He_ wanted to be the one to bring Crowley home from a bender, as illogical as the thought was. “Well,” he said. “Thank you for getting him. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.”

“Only the bit where I had to find him a bowl of phở,” Gabriel said. He looked down at Crowley and asked, in the tone of voice used by someone who knew the answer to the question but still couldn’t quite believe it, “has he fallen asleep?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said. “Excuse me for a moment.”

By the time he came back with a blanket to drape over Crowley, Gabriel was absent. He paused to push some hair from his demon’s forehead, unable to stop himself from smiling, then went back out into the main bookshop. As he expected, Gabriel was waiting out there, by the door, inspecting a collection of books on the golden age of piracy.

“I appreciate you bringing him by,” Aziraphale said.

Gabriel raised one shoulder in a shrug. There was something different about him, in a way that Aziraphale couldn’t quite put his finger on. Was it how he stood? Spoke? “I figured this may not be an unusual occurrence.”

“Well, the bit where he can’t sober himself up, that’s a bit uncommon,” Aziraphale said. “But the rest, certainly. We’re very good friends.”

Gabriel rubbed his chin with the back of his hand and looked like he was about to mention something that was on his mind; instead he said, “Well, right.”

“I do feel quite awful about not answering the phone,” Aziraphale added.

Gabriel looked amused. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. “Besides, he’s going to feel even worse in about, oh, six hours? That won’t be that much fun for you.”

“Couldn’t you miracle him alright again?” Aziraphale asked.

The archangel smiled, which troubled Aziraphale. It was a real smile, small and strangely honest, not like the one Gabriel used to throw about while cheerfully delegating tasks. “Oh, sure,” he said. “But this is probably a lesson he needs to learn the hard way.”

.

Crowley was dying. “I’m dying,” he said aloud, to no one in particular, because… no, wait. He wasn’t at home. His face was pressed against the familiar material of Aziraphale’s sofa, and a blanket that held the scent of his angel’s cologne was covering his head.

He vaguely remembered Gabriel from the night before. “Sinotmuhfalt eyelostmuhwalleh,” he had slurred, as the archangel had levered him out of the booth in the fancy bar he had fallen asleep in.

“Well maybe if you wore pants with pockets that could actually _fit_ your wallet, it wouldn’t be falling out and going missing,” Gabriel had said. At that point Crowley had started yelling at Gabriel for being too American and calling trousers _pants_, and that was as far back as Crowley could remember.

Except… he was at the bookshop now.

He woke out of his drunken half-sleep with a squawk. “AZIRAPHALE!”

There might have been customers out there, but as expected Aziraphale had them at the very lowest on his rung of concerns, and Crowley, these days, was at the very top. The angel was there so quickly he could have materialized from thin air, but more likely Crowley had just blacked out for a moment.

“How did I get here?” he asked.

Aziraphale pursed his lips. “Gabriel, I’m afraid,” he said.

So that was it, then. “_Noooooo_,” he moaned, trying to roll over and failing, because it was a sofa, after all, not a bed. “I drunk-dialled Archangel Gabriel.”

“Oh, no, you didn’t,” Aziraphale soothed. “The bartender did. Apparently she was concerned about you. And, er. The tab you racked up.”

Ah, shit. “I owe him so much money now,” he mumbled.

“No, you don’t,” Aziraphale said. Still in that nice, gentle voice that made Crowley want to crawl under his angel’s shirt and go to sleep, if that were at all possible. “Angels don’t do favours, only good deeds.”

“Ack. Disgusting.” He began to sit up and then very quickly decided that that was a bad idea, and laid back down.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” the angel asked.

“I think…” Crowley grasped at the shards of his memory. “I think I threw up last night.”

“You did, according to Gabriel. Twice.”

“Did you two have a nice little _chat_?” Crowley groused. He was quite certain he had not managed to throw up on Gabriel, which was probably just a wasted opportunity. While he didn't work for Hell anymore, Crowley still felt he had failed himself in terms of being demonic.

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow. It was impressive how quickly he could go from lovely bookstore owner to a contestant on RuPaul's _Drag Race_. “Not really,” he said. “You were my main concern. You do realize now, of course, that we can't simply just miracle away our overindulgences now.”

“Well, yeah, I knew that, but I kind of....” Crowley put his head back in the sofa and mumbled.

“What was that, dear?”

“_I forgot_.”

“Yes, you did,” Aziraphale said, and placed his hand on the back of Crowley's neck. Crowley relaxed. So the angel wasn't angry with him, good. He was not in a state to fend off bitchy Aziraphale.

His head pounding, he closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling of the angel's fingers in his hair, which he had been growing out and had gotten quite snarled over the past eight hours. He shivered as Aziraphale worked through a few snarls, the gentle tugs causing tingles in his scalp. He shifted, laying on his side, and Aziraphale sat on the edge of the sofa.

“Did you get your accounting done?” he murmured.

Aziraphale nodded. “Finished this morning, actually,” he said. He was silent for a moment, looking thoughtful. “Did you ask Gabriel to bring you here?”

“Hm? No, don't think so,” Crowley said. “But maybe.”

“Do you think he... suspects, anything?”

“Suspects what?” Crowley asked. “I mean, we're on each other's sides, that's kind of official now. We were sentenced to destruction over it and everything.”

“I'm just a bit worried.”

“Over what?”

Aziraphale looked amused. “Over you, of course,” he said. He bent down to kiss Crowley, his lips landing just above his eyebrow. “I can't let anything happen to you.”

Crowley's insides, already battered from the evening before, now squirmed uncomfortably. “Don't talk like that,” he whispered. Aziraphale smiled and smoothed his fingers through Crowley's hair.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, so Crowley did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "YEAH SURE YOU'RE TOTALLY JUST _FRIENDS_, I BELIEVE YOU." -Gabriel, never


	5. attachments

He’d been on Earth for nearly a year. Constantly, almost; he had only gone back to Heaven twice, and that had been in the first few months. Now he flat out refused any request unless it was a true emergency, and Heaven didn’t have emergencies. Partly he stayed away because going back to Heaven meant he would have to suddenly juggle all of the responsibilities and drama of his fellow archangels, but mostly it was because he was starting to feel a familiar feeling stirring in his chest once he had gotten used to being around humans again.

_You grow attached too quickly._

Had God actually ever said that to him, or had he only imagined it? In any case, She would know his faults, because She had made him. Was he doing what he was supposed to do, or was he straying? Had he always been straying? Maybe that was the point. Maybe he had been crafted to Her exacting standards, standards which were to bring about failure; but thinking that way made him feel angry, and he didn’t know why, but he knew that the anger was dangerous.

Actually, there were a lot of things he did not really know about himself. Archangels had been created, theoretically, to serve as the hands of God. In reality they were more like puppets to be manipulated, and Gabriel felt like he was one of the only ones who noticed that God had long ago stopped giving them any directions of substance.

That, too, was dangerous.

He was in France. For someone like Gabriel, distance was merely a thought exercise. In fact, when he had been texted by the rather irate bartender to pick up Crowley, he had been in New Delhi; it had taken him about an hour to make it to London, but only because he had been in a conversation with a cab driver and didn’t want to be rude. His choice to set up a base of operations in Mexico City had nothing to do with where it was located and everything to do with Beelzebub, not that he would say anything of the sort to her.

All around him, mobile phones had crystal-clear reception, internet connections sped up, and any stray journalist who wandered too close to him would find themselves suddenly swamped with tips for the next big story. Gabriel’s miracles had gained traction over the centuries, especially in the most recent few, as communication and technology had ramped up the more inventive humans became. Most angels needed to pull a miracle from Heaven or from within, but Gabriel was constantly producing them just by existing physically on Earth, always affecting everything around him; it was a quirk of being the Archangel responsible for communication.

That was why he had received the puzzling invite to the wedding, or, at least, that was his assumption. He had been the patron saint for the Devices since the Sixties, something which had really paid off for them in the Eighties – and while the youngest generation didn’t seem to bother or notice, he still regularly heard the prayers of the current reigning matriarch and her siblings. As for how they had managed to divine his address… well, that was a mystery, one which he wasn’t sure he was going to bother with solving, seeing as how he did not actually plan to attend.

He had not been back to Mexico City in several days. Instead he had found himself embarking on one of his wanderings, during which he tended to move from location to location, chasing either the daylight or the nighttime – whichever he preferred or was curious about, depending on where he was. Hobart was beautiful in the late morning; Singapore sparkled at night. He was constantly interacting or observing, filing all of his findings away in his mind; sometimes it even made it onto paper, though Gabriel did not really need to do that. His myriad of thoughts and observations stacked upon each other easily and endlessly, and were forever affecting and being affected by whatever came next.

It was early morning in Paris, and since June was nearing its end, Gabriel was told, they were reaching the peak of the summer season in the city. It was soft and cool as only a summer morning could be, with the promise of heat to follow. Most humans had a psychological response to the weather, which Gabriel found quite fascinating. It reflected in the way they interacted with him.

Walking down a street which housed several boutiques, Gabriel did not expect to need to stop, as everything was closed – and, of course, most of the designs showcased in the shop windows were of evening gowns and other styles. Paris nightlife had long ago ground to an end and he was trying to decide if he would move further north or perhaps go west. He did, however, suddenly find himself stopping at one store, considering the mannequin in the front window, and weighing his options.

Gabriel did not have many friends. He had assumed he did, only to discover, upon closer reflection, that he really only had two – and he counted Beelzebub as one of them, which was quite complicated. The other one was Mary, whom he rarely saw, despite their wishes otherwise. Angels mingling with humans, even dead ones who had attained sainthood, was considered just plain strange in Heaven.

He was too arrogant for friends, he’d concluded, upon partaking in some reflection and several piles of self-help books. That was another fault that constantly echoed through his brain. _Your arrogance is astounding,_ he heard in his mind. Not himself. Not God. Someone more important.

After about thirty seconds of deliberation he took out his phone and sent a text.

.

Crowley had been lazing about in his office, wondering how he might spend the day. Aziraphale was busy; they had agreed to meet tomorrow morning and perhaps go to the Tate, but until then Crowley found his social calendar rather… lacking. Working for Hell had been a job with its ups and downs but, at the end of the day, it had been a way to spend time, and you certainly met loads of interesting people.

His phone dinged. He checked the screen and saw it was Gabriel (they had communicated enough that Gabriel had at least been added to his contacts) and rolled his eyes. It had been about a week since the Drunken Incident and he wondered when, if ever, the archangel was going to rub it in his face. He swiped his thumb over the screen and brought up the text.

_Paris_

He blinked, and then Gabriel sent him a picture. It was a snapshot of a shop window, Crowley recognized, and while there was a slight glare from the glass, he could make out the outfit behind it easily enough.

Instantly he leaped to his feet, knocking his hip painfully against his desk in the process. Cursing, he jabbed at the phone icon on his screen and it began to ring.

“Hello?”

“You _know _it’s me,” Crowley said. “Where are you? What’s the address? _Do not let anyone buy it_!”

“Everything is closed right now, Crowley,” Gabriel reminded him. It was a very particular tone of voice, one which was pleasant and polite but silently said ‘calm your shit’. “It’s safe for now.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t just flap my wings and go wherever I want, I have to drive,” Crowley said. He looked at his watch even as he was heading for the door, grabbing his keys. He had to contort his body and arms to manage the juggling act of doing everything at once without dropping his phone. “I’m leaving right now. I’ll be there in four hours.”

“It’s a six hour drive.”

“Three, then.”

“Take the train,” Gabriel said. “If you drive you’re just going to discorporate yourself.”

“_Blahr_.” Crowley had to admit to the wisdom in that. He couldn’t just drive back and forth across the countryside and woe to anyone who got in his way; now he had to pay attention to not killing himself. How did humans do _anything_? “Augh. Fine. But don’t let anyone take my dress.”

Everything had managed to go from weird to surreal to suddenly normal, and Crowley had made the decision that he was just going to go with it.

“So just imagine it with Louboutins,” he said.

The first shop assistant had given them a _look_, but the second – a cheerful young British woman with a short shock of red hair to rival his own – had been more than happy to help. She had, however, made the mistake of assuming that Gabriel was his partner, which Gabriel had elegantly corrected by saying, “Ah, _no_, we’re just friends.” At that point, he and Crowley had just stared at each other, both equally confused and surprised by the statement: then Gabriel had sort of shrugged and nodded, and Crowley had nodded and sort of shrugged, so he supposed they were friends now.

“I’m imagining, and I’m disagreeing,” Gabriel answered. He was sitting on a couch just outside of the changing area, constantly texting on his phone, though in typical polite, angel-esque fashion, he had immediately put it away the moment Crowley had appeared in the dress.

Crowley put his hands to his hips. There were several mirrors available, and he was treated to multiple reflections of himself at different angles; and since the dress did wonders to his hips and flat chest he was more than pleased by the result. He could get away with the barest of padding, if any at all, in it. “_How_ can you disagree?” he asked.

“Because Louboutins are ridiculous.”

“I helped invent them!” The shiny red sole had just been the fashion version of a baited trap, and Crowley had been very pleased with himself. Until he fell for it, of course.

Gabriel waved his hand. “Yes,” he said. “And that proves my point.”

“Oh, shut up,” he said. “Tell me how the dress looks.”

“Fantastic.”

“Thank you,” Crowley said, mollified, even though technically Gabriel had been the one to pick it out.

“We do have a set of slingbacks that would go really well with it,” the shop assistant chimed in as she hung up a few tailored jackets.

While she was off doing that, Crowley inspected his legs. “Ought I do tights or shave, d’you think?” he asked.

“Depends on the shoes,” Gabriel reminded him. “'Toes, no hose'.”

“'No toes, hose',” Crowley finished. “That’s true.”

He pivoted his shoulders, admiring his reflection from the side. “You ever wear dresses?” he asked.

“Not since I switched bodies.”

Crowley was instantly alert, loathe as he was to drag his attention away from how good he looked. “You had a different body?” he asked. “What did you do, wreck it?”

“_No_.” Gabriel looked amused but also a little affronted at the idea he would ever do something so indecorous as trash a body. “I just retired it, that’s all. It was starting to become more trouble than it was worth. And Michael accused me of vanity.”

“What did it look like?”

“Like a human woman,” he replied. “Why are you so interested?”

“Well, sorry,” Crowley said, and motioned his hands over Gabriel’s outline, “but when I see _all of this_ I have a hard time picturing a body that could conceivably be any more of an exercise in vanity. Or any more trouble.”

“Was that a compliment?”

“Possibly. Come on, paint a picture.”

Gabriel raised his hands in defeat. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t _describe _humans.”

“Did Aziraphale ever see it?”

“Certainly. Though I don’t think he even noticed when I switched.”

Crowley had to grin at that. Aziraphale never seemed to notice things like that, not on the surface; but he knew that his angel did, indeed, have an eye for detail. Or maybe he was only like that with Crowley? “So, what, you just retired it?”

“For the time being, anyway,” the archangel said. “One never knows when high heels and winged eyeliner seem like a good idea again.”

“It’s always a good idea.”

“Disagree.”

“Got them!” The shopgirl popped up like a small, redheaded shoe fairy, bearing a pair of patent leather slingbacks with a pointed metal toe that looked like it could be weaponized. For Crowley, it was an instant purchase.

.

Crowley had convinced him to go for a drink.

Gabriel had not consumed alcohol since around the tail end of the fourteenth century. He had gotten so drunk and belligerent that God had forced him to experience the hangover – which had lasted eight days, and angels in Heaven still laughed about it when they presumed he was out of earshot.

Or, rather, Gabriel _assumed_ he must have been belligerent, since he had very little recollection of what had happened. He did remember it had mostly been Beelzebub’s fault, though, as that had been back in the days where they had seen more of each other. There had always been a sense of competition between them, where they tried to outdo one another – not just in terms of their respective numbers and quotas and the endless Heaven versus Hell debate, but personally, as well. Beelzebub had managed to out drink him but, to Gabriel’s credit, not by much.

He told all of this to Crowley, except for the bit where Beelzebub was involved; instead the details were in the extensive description of palm wine and also getting kicked out of several establishments. He had a feeling that mentioning Crowley’s former boss would evaporate the strange camaraderie developing between them, and he was unwilling to do that just then. Not just because of Crowley but Beelzebub too; they never spoke about what they did, they just did it. And Gabriel didn’t know what he would do if they stopped.

“So this is your first drink since 1365?” Crowley asked, aghast. “Fuck. I’m glad I sprang for the expensive stuff.”

“According to your bar tab, you always spring for the expensive stuff,” Gabriel said.

“I told you I’d pay you back!”

“And I told you absolutely not.”

“So holier-than-thou,” Crowley had said, with a veneer of disgust, but he was smirking. Then he took out his phone and held it up, just as Gabriel was taking a sip of his scotch.

“What are you doing?” Gabriel asked.

“Oh, taking a picture for my contacts,” Crowley said. He brought the phone back down to table level and began messing with it. “_Aha_. Now, whenever you call, I’ll be reminded I got you to drink alcohol.”

“I thought you didn’t work for Hell anymore.”

“Old habits die hard. Also, it’s fun.”

“Well,” Gabriel said, carefully. “I suppose that’s fair.”

Crowley narrowed his eyes. “What d’you mean, fair?”

“Well, since I already have a picture of _you _in my contacts.”

The demon blinked at him. Gabriel could see the telltale shift, even behind his sunglasses. “What?”

“From the other night.” After a moment in which he retrieved his phone, Gabriel showed him. It was Crowley eating a bowl of phở and, to put it nicely, noodles were everywhere.

“Delete that!”

“I will never delete this,” Gabriel said, jerking his arm back in a classic keep-away motion, while Crowley attempted to grab the phone. “This photo will exist until the last of civilization dissolves, and then for a little bit afterwards.”

“Wow, you’re such a bastard,” Crowley marvelled.

“I’ll tell you what,” Gabriel said, pocketing his phone. “I’ll delete the picture when I get a better one, though I doubt it.”

“Well,” Crowley said, looking resigned. “It was really good phở.”

“I believe you.”

They hadn’t lingered, only staying long enough for one drink. Crowley had turned down an offer of a quick flight back to London and had left with his purchases, stating that he had some banking to attend to. Gabriel felt unwilling to wander any longer, deciding instead to return to his base in Mexico City and go over the past few days. He sat in his office, staring out the window, not really looking at anything.

_Your arrogance is astounding. _God had not said that. He hadn’t said that to himself, either. It had been Beelzebub, sometime after World War II, when they had been comparing notes at the request of their respective offices. Before then, they hadn't spoken in nearly a century.

“I’m not arrogant,” he’d said.

“You think you’re better than me,” she’d replied.

Gabriel had been mystified. “I _am_,” he had said. “You are Fallen. You’re made from rebellion and evil; I am a creature of obedience, and love.”

Beelzebub had leaned back in her chair. They had been sitting in a Parisian restaurant, the remnants of Nazi occupation still all around them. She had detested Hitler but had concluded that he had been a rousing success, and the entirety of Hell had been happy to welcome him into the Pit and give him what he justly deserved: an eternity of pain. She’d been in a good mood, so when she spoke – even as she insulted him – she did it with a lazy, satisfied smirk. “Obedience, maybe,” she’d replied.

He wondered if she remembered ever saying that to him, or if it had been one of her many throwaway remarks that wasn’t supposed to stick. It had, though. Those words had burned themselves into his memory, sometimes temporarily forgotten but always remembered at the most inconvenient times, like when he had her in his arms, or she was sliding her hands underneath his coat. _Obedience, maybe_.

Angels were not meant to love, he had long ago concluded, just as demons were not meant to hate – he could feel it, sense it, recognize it around him, but never create it from within. It had been a harrowing and disappointing realization that he thought he'd long ago come to terms with until one day he had come face to face with something else: Crowley and Aziraphale, uniting themselves in a common front. They didn’t just love the world; they loved each other. Gabriel saw it clear as day, and when his rage about it had burned out he had been left feeling sick and weary and, most of all, confused.

In that chaotic time afterwards, Beelzebub had found her way back into his life in a way he had never experienced with anyone, let alone her. He knew she could not, would not believe he could love her, even as things began to shift and he felt it, painful and miraculous and blooming inside of his chest. He was in love with her, maybe always had been, and that discovery had been a moment of true joy, a flick of the switch that made him _believe_ again even as it was eating him up inside. He had never been in more pain in his entire existence, even as he carefully compartmentalized it.

Being in love brought with it a strange understanding of mortality. There was no way he could get away with it, with being in love, not without serious repercussions. Crowley and Aziraphale had cracked the code, maybe, but Gabriel held no illusions. Chances of survival were slim to none. He did not think God was paying much attention anymore, anyway, but once She did take a closer look he knew it was only a matter of time before he was found out.

As for Beelzebub, she would never believe that he loved her. She had made her thoughts on that quite clear, that day in Paris. But she knew he was obedient. He could, at least, give her that.

His phone buzzed and he knew without looking who it was.

_I know you’re there_, she had texted. _I’m here. Let me in._

_Always_, Gabriel thought. But she didn’t want to hear that. She only wanted him to do as she asked, so that’s what he did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dress Gabriel found for Crowley is [this one](https://vodkertonic.tumblr.com/post/187167853944/lacetulle-alexandre-vauthier-fallwinter-2019).
> 
> I honestly cannot remember when exactly I picked up the 'toes, no hose/hose, no toes' advice (ten years ago maybe?) but it was on some random fashion blog and it's been burned into my brain ever since. Gabriel and Crowley each break different 'fashion rules' but they are in agreement for that one. However, since the slingbacks were closed toe, it is still a mystery as to whether Crowley will shave. The world, as they say, is his oyster.


	6. a thousand ships

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little bit different from the rest, so here are some notes to help you along!
> 
> -In Beelzebub's memory/dream, she remembers Gabriel in his old body, alluded to in the last chapter. If you don't follow me on Tumblr, I revealed there that his old body is actually Elizabeth Taylor (like _actually_ Elizabeth Taylor; someone in Heaven messed up and an old archangel body ended up in the gene pool). Despite the body Gabriel is still referred to with masculine pronouns.  
-The following dream sequence belongs to Anathema. As a quick reminder, in chapter 2 she woke up after a nightmare and couldn't recall it.

She remembers sunlight on Gabriel's hair, long and dark, part of it twisted atop his head, curling tendrils escaping, the rest of his mane pouring down his back. Glints of silver were there, shining in the light, like a halo.

“There you are,” Beelzebub said.

Gabriel turned in a whisper of delicate lilac fabric, eyes gleaming bright and violet, a look on his face that she had begun to realize he reserved just for her. He had been so lovely back then, friendly and cheerful, full of chatter. Full of love, really. She had not appreciated it while it had lasted.

“Come and see this,” Gabriel said. His voice was feminine and musical, to match the body. “It's really quite impressive. Despite everything, you know.”

She joined him at the balcony. The ships had begun to set sail, the fleet seemingly endless, heading for Troy. Beelzebub leaned her elbows onto the bannister, lowering herself slightly.

“All this for a woman,” she said.

“You know that's not what it's about.”

“I know,” Beelzebub said. She glanced over at Gabriel. He was constantly mistaken as the goddess of love, something that entertained her. Beelzebub was never mistaken for anything, save for maybe a slab of rotten meat. Maybe a woman's face being able to launch a thousand ships was not so hard to believe, after all.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Gabriel asked, suspicious.

“I miss you,” she said.

“What?”

“I miss you like this,” Beelzebub said, suddenly sad. “You probably don't remember, but you were lovely, once. You managed to get through all the ugly things – the flood, Lot's family, murdering the firstborn of Egypt – and stayed just like this. Sweet. I told myself it sickened me. I think I told you that once, too.”

Gabriel was no longer looking at her, but gazing out at the ships again. The sea breeze lifted his hair, fluttered his skirt. In those days, he had been a bit shorter than her, and she could more easily appreciate his loveliness.

Beelzebub looked at the sea, also. “You survived all of God's cruelty, and then you started to change,” she said. “You got tougher and angrier. Less patient. I wish I could remember when it started. But I'm also glad I've forgotten.”

Gabriel worked a hand through his hair, tangled from the breeze. Beelzebub felt an uncomfortable squeeze in her chest, of sadness and loss, but could you feel loss for something you never really had?

“Oh,” Gabriel said, “that reminds me.” He wasn't listening, because this was a memory, and the conversation had gone a certain way. He twirled his hand in the air and suddenly, between forefinger and thumb, he was holding a small, delicate, pale-blue seashell.

Back then, when it had happened, Beelzebub had said, unimpressed, “Yes, Gabriel. That's a seashell.”

And Gabriel had just _laughed_. He was the only person in the world who found her delightful. “Look at the colour,” he said, holding it closer to her. “It reminded me of your eyes, so I picked it up. Here.” And he deposited it into Beelzebub's palm.

And Beelzebub, Lord of Hell, Prince of Flies, had closed her fingers around it. It was warm, from wherever Gabriel had been keeping it. It had reminded him of her, and so he had picked it up. And so Beelzebub – _lordofhell_, _princeofflies_, _demonofthepit_ – had pulled her arm back and chucked the shell over the balcony. It was so small that it was lost from view long before it even made the first half of its descent.

Gabriel watched with a faint smile on his face. Disappointed or amused? “You're incorrigible,” he'd said.

She didn’t answer, just looked out into the distance, wondering where the shell was now. 

“I wonder why I’m remembering this,” Beelzebub mused. “Maybe I’m angry with myself. I should have kissed you back then. Things would have been different if I’d gotten to you before everything else happened.”

She started in surprise when Gabriel closed his hand around her wrist, because that was new, that wasn’t part of the memory. She met his gaze, and he was frowning. The wind had picked up and strands of hair were getting tangled in his eyelashes.

“Gabe?” she asked, forgetting herself, for a moment.

“Go down the steps,” he said, nodding over her shoulder; she turned to look and saw them – they hadn’t been there before – descending down the edge of the cliff.

Beelzebub shook her arm free – when this sort of thing happened she never knew if she was speaking to herself, or someone else, perhaps another demon who had slithered their way into her dreams (as demons and angels dreamed differently from humans, not within their minds but within their spiritual selves). She turned away from the dream with a sigh – duty called – and began to make her descent.

As she went downwards things began to change. The stairs curled into a spiral and the cliffs of her memories began to fade as something else replaced them. The sea-drenched air was now heavy with a different moisture, a cold humidity as of deep underground, and she began to feel fuzzy at the edges. She was sad to let the memory go, but she had business to attend to. She knew now who had summoned her.

.

The cave was wet and cold, but there was heat from the torch; it blazed in front of Anathema’s face as she lifted it up and illuminated the ceiling and walls. She expected cave drawings – too many colonial-esque adventure movies warping her judgement, probably – but instead she saw swirls of colour and light. Lichen in every conceivable colour, stone that looked like the inside of an abalone shell.

A scrape, a buzz, a voice that was only barely a voice. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

Someone else was in there with her, which she expected, for the most part – she felt like she had hoped for a companion. Still, Anathema would have preferred better company than the figure that emerged from the darkness – a strange and wavering outline, not quite separate from the shadows.

Only her sense of the occult told her that this was a demon, and a ferocious one. There was nothing else for her to distinguish them by, as she could barely make out a face in the wavering darkness, and the voice was accompanied by a strange buzzing noise that invaded the inside of her skull. Despite that there was something very familiar about them. “When did you arrive?” she asked, forgetting, for a moment, the old ways. Of bowing to dangerous creatures, of politeness and hospitality followed to the letter.

“The same time as you. And a long time before,” the demon added.

“Are we asleep?”

“_You_ are,” they said. “Myself? Maybe.”

Anathema didn’t feel afraid, but she knew she ought to be. But instead of fear Anathema felt like she was having a conversation with a tour guide – a mild curiosity was present, but she was more interested in what she was about to discover than anything else. “Can I ask you a question?” she asked.

“The answer might cost you.”

Anathema shouldered on. “How might I address you?”

The demon smiled, sharp and white in the darkness of their face. Small but genuine, and full of amusement. “I am Lord Beelzebub,” they said. “I appreciate your manners. I worry, sometimes, that they become forgotten. But witches always know what they’re about, don’t they? Now, come with me. And put out that torch.”

Anathema had no choice but to shove the flaming end of the torch into the sandy ground, and follow.

They had left the cave, and now instead of the chill Anathema felt the heat. The darkness was still there, though, pressing in on all sides.

“You’re helping me,” Anathema hazarded.

“Is that a question?”

“I- yes.”

It was a jungle, and the trees were thick and invasive. The paths among them were narrow, perhaps having been tread only by the lightest of feet, and water was coming down in drips and drops. Anathema felt it on the back of her neck; each breath was wet and humid. She could see but only barely. “Why are you helping me, then?” she asked, trying, and failing, to avoid a branch heavy with vines. It felt familiar, though she’d never been there before.

“You asked for me, in a way I could not ignore,” the demon said.

A shiver passed through Anathema. That meant only one thing: she had summoned Beelzebub, and that did not sit well with her at all. That kind of thing usually had a price. “This forest exists, doesn’t it?” she said, instead, trying to distance herself from the subject of asking a demon for help

Beelzebub seemed to slip among the trees without issue, though Anathema knew they were existing there just as much as she was, if only because their feet were making impressions on the ground wherever they stepped. “It does, if you manage to get lost the right way, and you don’t get rightfully stuck full of arrows by any tribespeople,” the demon said.

“Are you making a jab against missionaries?”

The demon chuckled. It was an ugly, wet, bloody sound. “I was part of a deal, a long time ago,” Beelzebub said, and it took Anathema a moment to realize they were talking about something else, now. “A deal made with one of your foremothers.”

“The Nutters?” The demon didn’t answer and she took their silence as a ‘no’. “The Devices?”

“No,” Beelzebub said. “An older family, a few continents apart. One which was about to die off, actually, but you’ll see what I mean, soon enough.”

“How will I see?” That was, Anathema knew (if only by being warned repeatedly by her abuela about such things), a very important question to ask. Besides, if the demon had been summoned to help her, Anathema supposed she could keep asking questions.

“We’re approaching a pocket of time,” Beelzebub said. “The edges are soft and you can go through, but don’t travel too deep into it. There is something very big and very dark in there trying to get out, and I suggest you not disturb it.”

“What am I looking for? What needs to be seen?”

“Memories. Of something that happened a long time ago,” the demon said, “Six hundred years ago, in this jungle. Actually, you tried to get here before, but you got lost.”

Something tickled her brain, told her why this was somehow familiar and strange at the same time. She had already dreamt of this jungle, and she had woken with a mouth full of blood – she had not made it to her destination, something had stopped her. The fear she had been ignoring was beginning to arrive. “I didn’t make it, the first time,” she gathered.

“To put it mildly,” they said. They stopped walking, suddenly, and Anathema looked around, but nothing about their surroundings suggested they had arrived anywhere. “Something tried to eat you. I suppose subconsciously you didn’t want to go through that again and called for me. I was having quite a nice dream of my own before you interrupted it.”

“My apologies,” Anathema said, automatically, because you always apologized to demons.

Beelzebub paused, or seemed to, on the edge of a rough remark. They moved to touch Anathema’s cheek; their fingertips were hot, with a chill edge to them. “You know, I liked her, your foremother,” they said. “You don’t look like her at all, of course. Not one bit. But you have the same presence, a sort of… desperate energy. You’re more powerful than you realize. And you will become even more powerful, soon enough.”

Anathema thought she saw something uneasy in the demon’s eyes – they were blue, she realized suddenly. She could see them quite clearly now, very human-looking. And she recognized the face, too; the demon was the same one who had come out of the ground at the airbase. They had stood shoulder to shoulder with an archangel, spoke to the Antichrist without a flicker of fear. Seeing them made her forget, immediately, whatever else she thought she saw, though the memory of having known something gnawed at her. Their hand was still on her face.

“Who knows,” Beelzebub continued. “You might even survive your wedding day. Now go. Exactly twelve paces, then stop. You’ll see what you need to see.”

“And then what?”

“You leave it, and you wake,” said Beelzebub. Then they finally drew away, and the shadows seemed to wiggle back onto the demon, obscuring them from Anathema’s eyes until they were nothing more than blurry darkness again. “Do yourself a favour and write everything down. I am not meant to be helpful beyond this, and I can only be summoned thrice. This counts as the first.”

They stood there, facing each other. Anathema knew that as soon as she turned her back the demon would be gone. That should have comforted her; but the thought of walking through the dark jungle alone filled her with dread. Suddenly she found herself wishing for Newt.

“Go on,” Beelzebub directed.

Anathema turned away. She did not look back.

.

Beelzebub woke. She was disappointed to see that she had fallen asleep at her desk; she’d have preferred to wake up to something prettier than her office. A pair of violet eyes, maybe.

She turned to her calendar, pinned to the wall, edges peeling. Hell was enjoying its usual day-to-day grind, because even without the promise of an Apocalypse things still needed getting done whether the world was going to end in fire and flame or not.

The last day of August had been circled off. Less than a month and a half away, now, Beelzebub noted, seeing that the days had crept into July; funny how quickly time went by when you weren’t looking forward to something. She was a Prince of Hell, yes, but it was just a job, and even though she did it well there were some days she really didn’t enjoy herself. Whether humans bowed to temptation or not were up to her demonic agents; she just sat in her office and signed the paperwork.

There was a reason she’d started to give Hastur the majority of her workload on Earth, and it wasn’t just because Gabriel had pulled away from her after that disastrous night in 1365. It was because when humans asked for the darkest of deals to be struck she was the one with the authority to sign off on them, and despite her warnings of the price they had to pay they always said yes.

It was going to be an absolute shame to see an entire family get devoured, but she had to go. A deal was a deal, and it had to be paid in full.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHOOP sorry this took me some time! The story is at one of those really weird points where I was struggling to transition between the plot (believe it or not the story has one, despite my best efforts) and the other ridiculous stuff. Things hopefully will go smoother now. And I'm sorry if there are any sentences that don't make sense or odd spellings here and there; I don't use a beta and I'm having weird brain activity at the moment!!! Eheheh
> 
> And yes, I'm aware that Helen of Troy and all the rest are considered a myth; but if you haven't picked up on it by now I'm not a Christian and definitely don't think the Garden and the Flood and etc were real either, so I mean. Gimme a break guys.


	7. the exorcism of anathema device

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anathema returns from her dream journey with a friend.

Anathema was acting strange. She _always_ acted strange, of course, to other people; but that was just Anathema being Anathema, and Newt was quite used to it by now. Quite in love with it, actually, when it wasn’t turned up to startling levels.

It had begun earlier in the week. At first Newt had put it down to the annoyances of the wedding, which was in the final, flurried stages of planning. Anathema was less likely to care about what colour their table napkins were than he was, but they had both agreed they weren’t going to lump the majority of the work on their respective mothers, and would indeed make the effort. _They_ were the ones getting married, after all, even though the wedding itself was mostly an excuse for Anathema’s family to get drunk, and Newt’s mother to buy a nice dress.

On Wednesday night, they were sitting together in the living room and going over the RSVP’s for finalizing the seating arrangements. “These are the people who haven’t said they’re coming, but,” he said, and paused for her to respond. Anathema’s psychic abilities had been flourishing lately – he was glad he had proposed to her when he had, really would have ruined the surprise otherwise – and she had been acting quite complacently in regards to her multitude of guests. She believed something more exciting than nuptials was set to occur on their wedding day, but had still not managed to get a fix on what, exactly, was coming. She had a better handle on who would actually be present than even the people planning on attending.

Anathema looked curiously at the list. “Yes?”

“Er, well, are we still keeping some of them on the chart?” he asked.

She had shrugged. “Why should we? They missed the deadline.”

A few hours later, as they got ready for bed, he noticed Anathema staring at him with an intense, curious look in her eyes, and her pupils seemed larger somehow. When he woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, Anathema was not in bed any longer; he found her in the kitchen, sitting at the table, doing nothing but staring at the wall. She cheerfully sent him back to bed without any explanation.

Thursday was stranger. He watched as she drank a glass of raw eggs for breakfast, and asked him about her own mother. Then she left to run errands, and he decided to make a call.

“She’s acting quite strange,” he said, uneasily, to his mother.

“Just wedding nerves, Newt! Or maybe she has something else on her mind. Ask her about it when she gets home and you’ll sort it out. Remember, communication is so important in a relationship, no matter how long you’ve been together.”

But when Anathema got home she was perfectly fine, laughed about her breakfast (‘an article I read’), and chatted at length about how they should probably order more hard liquor for the reception. They ordered takeout from her favourite Thai place for dinner and watched Netflix. When Newt asked her if she was feeling alright lately, she had thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve just had a lot on my mind.” And she kissed him on the earlobe and thanked him for asking.

Something still bothered him, though, despite her assurances. Maybe it was just that there was something wrong with _him_, and he was projecting onto her. That night he laid next to her in bed, her back to him, seemingly having fallen asleep within minutes of turning off the light. He listened to her soft breathing, and the noise of cars on the street outside, and watched the gentle swoop of outdoor lights on the dark ceiling. _She’s fine_, he told himself._ I’m fine. Everything’s fine_.

But something kept troubling him, creating a knot of tension in his stomach.

Finally, he managed to sleep. He dreamed about their holiday the previous winter, in Jasper. They had walked through the quaint little streets with snowflakes whispering down all around them, and held hands against the cold. The winter chill made Anathema’s cheeks bloom red and rosy, and her eyes seemed to sparkle in the early darkness. She was born in the balmy climes of California, but he always felt the snow suited her best.

A soft, grating noise woke him up. Well, not grating; it was more like a _purr_, rough but contained, a noise made internally rather than externally. He had fallen asleep on his side, so he shifted, glancing over his shoulder. Anathema was not in bed, her space on the mattress empty.

“Anathema?” Newt’s voice was rough with sleep. He reached for his glasses on the bedside table, putting them on even as he blinked rapidly, trying to clear his vision. The noise was constant and steady. His ears following the source before his eyes could, he looked up without wondering why.

Anathema was on the ceiling, laying on her stomach as if it were the floor. Her fingers were digging into the plaster and her hair hung down like a curtain, waving gently with the subtle movements of her body (a soft shifting, back and forth, as if she were a cat thinking about pouncing). She was not looking at him, and he did not want her too. Her face seemed pressed against the ceiling as if it were a pillow.

Newt didn’t know that much about supernatural activity, but he wasn’t born under a rock.

Very, very slowly, he began to ease out of bed. The frame creaked, and he paused, but she did not move beyond her ceaseless shifting. Her feet were twitching against the ceiling as he slowly left the room and closed the door carefully behind him. His own phone was in the bedroom, still, but since he dared not go back and get it he found their shared tablet in the kitchen and opened up Skype, using it to dial a landline.

It was four in the morning, but Anathema’s mother picked up the phone within two rings. “Bueno?”

“Yeah, hi, Mrs. Device-”

“You really need to start calling me Rosa, Newt,” she said.

“Rosa,” Newt said. “Your daughter seems to be possessed.”

“Como?”

“She’s on the ceiling. Like, she’s disobeying gravity.”

There was silence on the other line.

“Let me call you back,” she said. “Can you get her down somehow?”

Could he? Newt grabbed their broom, Harold (that was the name of the model of broom, apparently, so they had taken to calling it that) and proceeded carefully back to the bedroom. She was right by the ceiling light, so he didn’t flick them on in case he startled her; instead he turned the lights in the hallway on, letting them illuminate the bedroom partway.

“Anathema?” he asked. “Maybe you should come down.”

Anathema’s face twitched in his direction in a way that made him wonder if he should have watched _The Exorcist_ at some point in his life, because then he might actually know what to do. She didn’t say anything, prompting him to add: “You know. If you want.”

“I want _blood_, boy,” Anathema uttered in a guttural tone, though it was quite clear now that it wasn’t Anathema, not really. Had she been phasing in and out, or had she been gone for days now? The fear spiked horribly through his chest, but if there was one emotion Newt was used to, it was that. And he could use it. He tightened his grip on Harold the broom.

“No blood for you!” he said, and proceeded to try to knock Anathema off the ceiling.

Anathema hissed and grabbed at the broom with both hands. The lights in the hallway flickered, the bathroom door flew open with a bang. Something – a bat, or a bird, or a creature more diabolical, maybe – hit the bedroom window with a crack. As she cursed at him and spat and spoke in tongues, Newt managed to dislodge her from the ceiling and neatly tumble her onto the bed.

Holding the broom in front of him, he approached the bed carefully as Anathema struggled to sit up, pulling her long hair out of her face, untangling herself from her nightgown. But her eyes were clear and lucid when she met his gaze.

“What are you doing with Harold?” she frowned.

“Look,” he said. “Please don’t take this in a weird sexual way, but we need to tie you up.”

Driving would take too long, so Newt waited while Anathema’s mother and grandmother boarded a plane from Malibu. Anathema kept leaving, replaced with a bitter, hoarse-voiced, disturbingly childish and sexual personality. Newt did not dare go to sleep, instead kept her company whenever Anathema herself seemed to come back.

He moved Anathema to the kitchen so he could get her water or anything else without having to leave her alone in the room. Taking advantage of a moment of being in control, she had put on one of her favourite dresses, despite Newt’s protests otherwise, before submitting to getting tied to one of the kitchen chairs. “If I’m going to be exorcised, I’ll be exorcised wearing underwear,” she’d insisted.

It had been nearly four hours since Newt had called for help and Rosa Device was able to catch a flight… and get to their house, and tell him what to do to fix this. Newt had hoped that once the relatives arrived it would be smooth sailing, but he was rudely awakened the minute Rosa dropped her carry-on bag and shook her head at her tied-up daughter.

“Newt, just because some of the family are witches doesn’t mean we are well-versed in demonic possession,” Rosa said, exasperated, when he asked why they weren’t immediately expelling the demon from Anathema’s body. “We’re investors who inherited a book of prophecy. We aren’t wizards in television series.”

Rosa’s mother, who answered to ‘Grandma’ from not only her family and Newt, but also from everyone under the age of forty in a two mile radius, just frowned. “None of us have ever been possessed before,” she stated.

“Mama, this is not Anathema’s fault,” Rosa said, sharply. “Have you spoken to Abuela?”

“Your Abuela is ninety-eight,” Grandma said. “And says we should either pray or call a priest. And I don’t want to call in a priest. They are the worst exorcists. I was reading the other day how they contribute to death among the mentally ill...”

“Newt,” Anathema asked, softly, though her voice managed to cut through the two warring generations arguing around her, straight to him. “Could you braid my hair for me, please? I don’t want it to get too tangled.”

“Sure,” he said. He’d had no idea how to braid until he met Anathema, and even now he struggled a bit with anything fancier than a French braid, but that was fine for the both of them. Not that hair-braiding was a particularly interesting pastime for him, but it was a way that he and Anathema would find comfort in one another, physically – in the careful rearranging of each strand of hair Newt found the solace of concentration and Anathema relaxed from the stress of her magical gifts.

He brushed his fingers through her hair, carefully pulling apart the tangles. Anathema sighed and closed her eyes, leaning her head back as he pulled sections of hair away from her scalp and began to weave them in.

He was comforted by her stillness, and her gentled breathing. Good. He grabbed one of the hair ties she was forever leaving around the place – this one was on the paper towel holder – and tied off the end of the braid. It wasn’t bad, he decided. When he had first learned the French braid he was so abysmal at sectioning out equal pieces of hair she sometimes ended up looking like she had a growth on her head.

“Thanks,” she sighed.

“No problem.” He walked around to face her and she smiled up at him. He bent down to give her a light kiss on the lips.

When he straightened up again, Anathema was smiling wide, so wide and in such a painful-looking manner that Newt winced. “Hello, pretty thing,” the demon said, in a high-pitched voice.

“Oh,” he said, as Rosa and Grandma crowded behind him, glaring at the creature wearing their daughter. He did his best to ignore the shiver that trailed down his spine. “You again.”

“Oh, you brought the family,” the demon exclaimed. “That’s so nice. Now it’s a real party, huh?”

“We are getting you out of my daughter,” Rosa growled. The demon gave her a dismissive look, and instead narrowed her eyes at Newt. Under that Hellish stare he felt his skin break out with a thousand, needle-like goosebumps.

"She _is_ going to die, you know," she said, in a harsh whisper. Newt felt as if a rasp were being drawn against his vertebrae. "Just as you fear she will. It will be a terrible death, too. Her soul will be left, half-devoured, to wander the earth all alone…"

Newt knew that better, more impressive men would be able to shake this demon free. That a _real_ witchfinder of history would be able to pull a demon out of his damn, damned fiancée.

But he wasn't a real witchfinder, because stumbling across witches wasn't the same as actually looking for some. He was just the luckiest unlucky bastard in the northern hemisphere, or at least that's what he suspected. There was no other way a life full of disappointments somehow culminated in someone as wonderful as Anathema. So he did what he always did: take other people’s suggestions to heart. Her Abuela insisted on prayer.

"Dear, er, God, please help me out here…"

The demon hacked out a laugh, interrupting what was, fumblingly, Newt’s first prayer.

“Really?” she asked. “You’re going to pray to _God_? You think God has the time for this?”

“Um,” Newt said. The eyes of his future wife were black and glittering with venomous amusement. “Aren’t all prayers to God?”

She shifted in her bonds, a contained sort of coiling movement, and leaned back in her chair. “You’re not a religious man, are you?” she laughed. “No knowledge as well as no conviction.”

“People pray to God all the time!” Newt was relatively sure that was correct.

“Yes, but you have to really mean it,” the demon said. “You need _belief_. You have none.”

“Well, bollocks to that!” Newt said, frustrated beyond belief. He was done arguing with the demon wearing Anathema’s body, he was done with not knowing what was going on, and he was especially done with worrying about finding his fiancée on the ceiling in the middle of the night, which was where everything was headed if they didn’t clear the demon out of her soon. “Mrs Device’s-”

“Rosa.”

“-Ebola-”

“Abuela.”

“-Said that prayer works just fine in this family!”

The demon gave him a snooty look. “_You’re_ not a witch,” she said. “Or a Device. You’re just a child. Go on, then, go on. Try. Bring down the might of God upon me, and I will rip this body apart until all that’s left is a handful of bloody meat to chuck in the garbage. She’s not made of much, after all… mostly bones, and dreams, and hair. Easy to tear.” And the demon clicked Anathema’s molars together and grinned. “Like paper.”

“Let’s call Abuela and ask for the name of a priest,” Rosa muttered calmly to her mother, her face full of fury.

Anathema always told Newt that he was a good listener. He didn’t see what was so great about that; as far as he was concerned, anyone could listen, all you had to do was shut up. But Newt listened the way people who had been ignored all their lives did: they actually paid attention.

When Newt had visited America for the second time, they had taken a road trip south to the border, where Anathema’s Abuela lived. She lived in a big house full of stained glass, wind chimes, and with something constantly cooking in the oven. Also, there were images of the Pope and the Virgin Mary _everywhere_.

As Rosa and Anathema argued about recipes in the kitchen, Abuela sat Newt down in the front room with some hibiscus tea and talked to him at great length. She kept forgetting herself and would speak to him in Spanish every now and then, which Newt could not understand, but for the most part the conversation went well as long as it was in English.

“So your great grandmother is… really religious,” he had remarked, on the drive back the next day.

“Is she?” Anathema asked.

“Well, I mean, in comparison to you and your mother,” he said. “Doesn’t that clash with the whole witch thing?”

“Not as much as you’d think,” she replied, shifting gears (Newt was too terrified to drive on the right side of the road). “Colonialism made its mark, but it was only about halfway successful. You know, Santisima Muerte has a massive following and she isn’t recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church. But here we are, and there’s a giant statue of a robed skeleton in Abuela’s guest room.”

Saints. They prayed to saints. Newt pulled out his phone and began googling. The first results were all unanimous: Saint Michael. “Right,” he muttered. “Let’s see.”

They dragged the chair away from the table and into the middle of the kitchen, with the demon taunting Newt the entire time. Mostly about a lack of sexual prowess, but she also threw in a few jabs about how he needed to work out more, and also that he had wasted his life on computers. Apparently (again, this was according to Newt’s google searches) demons airing your dirty laundry was a popular pastime when they possessed humans.

“Look, do what you like, but keep her stable,” Rosa had directed him. She and her mother were furiously making calls, trying to find a priest that not only believed them about the possession, but would agree to perform an exorcism. It was apparently more difficult than they thought.

Fine. Newt would do this and it would make him feel like he was at least accomplishing something, more than anything else.

First he stood in front of Anathema and spoke the prayer, a long and unwieldy thing that he had to read off of his phone. The demon laughed at him. He tried that a few times, before taking a chair over to sit right in front of her, and look into her eyes while he spoke, hoping that might work better.

The demon laughed, hysterically, lolling back against the chair, nearly tipping it over. She wore Anathema’s body like a little girl wore a dress – pretty but also in the way, like it was stopping her from doing the demonic version of climbing trees. She bucked and fought against the rope keeping her neatly tied there, but all she succeeded in doing was bruising Anathema’s wrists and arms and ankles.

In a few of the silent moments, when the demon stared at him with black, glittering eyes, Newt considered the prayer before him. “So Michael is an archangel _and_ a saint? That hardly seems fair.”

“Tell me about it,” the demon said. “Michael’s a dick, anyway.”

Newt read and reread the prayer several times. Eventually the demon just closed her eyes in annoyance, but sometime around the sixth reading she opened her eyes, which were bright and clear, despite the pale exhaustion of her face.

“Anathema?” he whispered.

She blinked at him, tiredly. There were shadows under her eyes. “Hi,” she whispered back.

“It’s not working, is it?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “No,” she said. “But I like hearing your voice, even through all the mess in my brain.”

“I’m sorry.”

Anathema smiled at him, startling him, because there was a shade of delight in her expression. “_Why_?” she asked. “You never give up. I love that about you.”

He was engaged to her and yet she still sometimes made his palms sweat nervously, like he had just met her and was trying not to embarrass himself. “Do you want to hear the prayer again?”

“Mmmhmm,” she said. “Go on.”

He kept going.

It was twenty minutes later, and nothing had changed. Newt knew the prayer off by heart, and yet nothing was happening. Even the demon seemed tired of his endless attempts. “You know trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity,” she muttered.

“It isn’t,” Newt said.

“Well, what about stupidity?” she countered.

He couldn’t argue with that. He sighed, closing his eyes, and heard the continued, angry murmuring of Anathema’s mother and grandmother in the living room. If only one of them had seen this coming, or maybe if Anathema had… but they hadn’t, and that was the future he and Anathema had wanted for themselves. To take things as they came. You just had to rely on yourself and what you knew.

Something small occurred to Newt, based on his conversations with Anathema’s Abuela. He took out his phone again. The demon gave a huge full-body sigh.

“Really?” she asked. “Another go?”

A saint’s prayer, a saint’s prayer… Newt nodded to himself. Maybe he needed a different Saint, one personal to the family.

“Right,” he said, sitting forward in his chair and clearing his throat. “Okay. Ahem.”

“Take your time,” the demon said.

“Oh blessed Archangel Gabriel…”

The demon snickered. “Gabriel? Really?”

“Shut up,” Newt said. “Oh blessed Archangel Gabriel, we beseech thee… do thou intercede for us at the throne of divine mercy in our present necessities…”

The demon shook Anathema’s head. The early morning light coming in through the windows brought out the red glints in her hair. “This is so boring,” she complained. “The Michael prayer was better. At least everyone knows to steer clear of Michael. Gabriel’s a little bitch.”

“... the praise of God forever in the land of the living. Amen.”

“Snore.”

Something snapped in Newt’s brain. This wasn’t fair, it really wasn’t. He glared at the text on his phone, then at the demon, then back at his phone. He heard musical notes of Spanish from the next room. Still looking for a priest.

“Oh blessed Archangel Gabriel,” he repeated, only very loudly this time. The voices in the living room paused. “We beseech thee, do thou intercede for my fiancée, Anathema Device, at the throne of divine mercy in her present necessities-”

“Ooh, you personalized it.”

“-that as thou didst announce to Mary the mystery of the Incarnation, so through thy prayers and patronage in heaven we may benefit-”

There was a sharp noise. Newt looked up from his phone. The kitchen window had slammed shut. How long had it been open?

The demon giggled. “Cute,” she said.

Try again, he told himself. Don’t give up. _I love that about you_. “Oh blessed Archangel Gabriel, we beseech thee, do thou intercede for us-”

“Is someone vacuuming?”

“-do thou intercede for us at the throne of divine mercy-”

“Seriously,” the demon snapped, looking, for the first time, rattled. “What is that noise?”

Newt ignored her, ignored everything. “In our present necessities, that as thou didst announce to Mary the mystery of the Incarnation, so through thy prayers and patronage in heaven we may obtain the benefits of the same-”

Rosa came into the kitchen, clutching her phone in her left hand. Her eyes were wide, so wide he saw the whites clearly around her irises. “Newt, what are you doing?” she whispered, rubbing her arm. Her hair seemed especially… large, as if it were puffing up. In fact, he could feel the hair on his arms raising… and on the back of his neck… up along the curve of his skull…

The demon hissed and bucked in the chair.

“-sing the praise of God forever in the land of the living. Amen.”

Lightning struck.

Newt opened his eyes, his ears ringing. He had expected to be on the floor – had the demon gotten free, flung his chair back? But he was on his feet, at the other end of the room, and the chair was knocked over a few feet away.

He didn’t remember anything. Just a force – like getting slapped in the face, in fact. But more of a full-body slap, like hitting water from a large height. The chair that had held the demon was in pieces, as if bashed apart by something, the rope hanging loose over the broken parts.

Anathema herself was on the ceiling, screaming, twisting, roiling about like boiling water. Bits of plaster began to come down from her thrashing, and for a moment Newt had the illogical panic of the neighbour’s making a noise complaint.

Newt thought he heard Rosa sob and scream, “Get her down!” but there was nothing any of them could really do but watch as Anathema shrieked and scrabbled as if she were being electrocuted. It was perhaps only five seconds but it was, to Newt, the longest hour of his life.

Then there was a moment of stillness, and she fell, and he threw himself forward. Newt knew she was too heavy for him to actually catch, so he did the next best thing, taking the brunt of the fall as she crashed down on him.

He laid there, dazed, as (he assumed) Rosa or Grandma helped Anathema up and off of him. Which was crazy… she would be in no state to stand… he struggled upright. He heard something small and hard, like a coin, strike the linoleum by his head.

Someone walking quickly by him stopped to put his glasses, which had been knocked off, into his hand.

“Up, mija, up. Are you alright?” Rosa was helping Anathema stand, and Newt felt he could breathe again. He slipped his glasses on and the world slid back into focus – a bit fuzzy at the edges, but mostly clear.

There was plaster and bits of chair and broken glass from the counter all over the floor. A few things had fallen over. His head pounding, he helped Rosa get Anathema onto the couch, only to collapse onto it next to her. The front door slammed shut.

Her face pale and her skin damp with sweat, bits of hair sticking to her forehead and her eyes rimmed red, Anathema smiled at him. “Nicely done,” she whispered. She leaned into him and her body was cold, shivering hard, but she seemed to be in one piece, and calm.

Rosa put a blanket over the both of them before Newt could try to get up and be more useful. “You stay,” she ordered.

Anathema’s Grandma entered the room, looking shaken.

“Well,” she said. “I owe your Abuela so many apologies. His eyes _are_ purple.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> STORY NOTES:  
-Yes, you CAN google 'prayers for exorcism' and 'prayers to saints' and get the ones in this article. Newt is of the google generation, and thus, when faced with problems, HE DO THE GOOGLE  
-Again, if I have made any language or cultural mistakes, I really do apologise. I am working off of my own experiences of Mexico and California, as well as research and my own practices. The Mexican branch of Anathema's family practices folk Catholicism.
> 
> This chapter was exceptionally difficult for me to write (writer's block + mental illness + 'but your ideas are really bad though?'), so please let me know if you liked it! It was like punching myself in the face over and over again, which is generally how I always feel about writing, but this time it was like I was wearing brass knuckles.
> 
> I luuuuuurve you guys, though! And since the last update this story even got a bit of fanart and I screamed and died, came back to life, and died again. Artist Naniiebim on tumblr drew [this gorgeous piece](https://vodkertonic.tumblr.com/post/188528252384/mulder-wtf-vodkertonic-angelsdiningatritz) of Crowley wearing the dress Gabriel finds for him. GO LOOK AT IT, IT IS BEAUTIFUL.
> 
> As always you can reach me here or on vodkertonic.tumblr.com where I smoke and drink and engage in tomfoolery.


	8. paranoia

He decided to leave quickly, with as little fuss as possible. It had been a long time since Gabriel had been forcefully summoned and it had caught him unawares, but it was a small enough thing to pull a demon out of a human when you were an archangel. There was a delicate touch to it, however, that Gabriel no longer had. He’d fallen out of practice.

So when she fell from the ceiling her body was, physically, a wreck. If the love struck young man hadn’t insisted on breaking her fall with his own body Gabriel would have caught her himself. Instead he whisked into corporeal form so that he could bend to touch the back of her shoulder – painlessly healing all of her cracked bones and torn muscles in a single instant – and to pick up a set of eyeglasses on the floor and place them into the young man’s palm. 

“Anathema!” She had to be her mother, as only a mother would ignore Gabriel’s sudden appearance in favour of helping the young woman up. Gabriel sidestepped her, casting his gaze around, looking for what Anathema had coughed up during the exorcism. He found it, dark and sooty-looking against the linoleum, and put it in his coat pocket. It burned his fingertips when he touched it. 

Gabriel had not been paying much attention, lately – an unavoidable result of playing the fool was, sometimes, he was genuinely foolish – but he recognized the people there. The young ones had been at the Tadfield airbase four years ago. The two older women were definitely Devices, so it was likely they all were. He’d seen the oldest one when she was a baby, and humans were identical to their childhood selves when you looked at them the right way.

Adding everything up, the logical assumption was that Gabriel had just exorcised a demon from a bride-to-be who had, inexplicably, invited him to her wedding. Something strange was afoot and he didn’t like it. He headed for the door.

“San Gabriel!”

The oldest woman of the clan had followed him to the front of the house. “Yes?” he asked.

“Thank you,” she said, in the tone of voice of someone who knew, without a doubt, the intensity of what had just occurred. 

Gabriel put his hand in his pocket where the medal seemed to buzz from the demon that was trapped inside of it. He nodded to her, politely, and left. He found the less words exchanged with humans who knew who he was, the better – especially when it was a family under his protection.

Outside the streets were warm and glowing with sunrise, and Gabriel checked his phone to figure out where he was. San Francisco. Good; there had to be somewhere nearby where he could buy a pack of cigarettes. Smoking didn’t solve anything, but he had found that thinking about a problem in the space of time it took to smoke a single cigarette usually gave him, if not a solution, at least the first step.

.

Gabriel was lying to her.

On the outside, Beelzebub was impressed. She admitted to herself that he wasn’t lying, actually; he was _ omitting_. But an omission was as good as a lie to an angel, and it wasn’t something they tended to do. Not even Gabriel, who was more likely to bend the rules than any other archangel.

As usual, she was the one who sought him out; for all he seemed to enjoy her company, at least when she had him pinned down, he never reached out to her first. Which is what she preferred, she told herself. Gabriel at her beck and call.

Then, two days ago, he’d replied to her text with a single word. _ Busy_.

When she called him yesterday to suggest a future time, he had been evasive. “I have work to do, you know,” he had said, in a severe tone of voice; the sort of voice that made her want to reach through the phone and slap him. But she had remained calm even as the alarm bells started going off in her head.

She had once considered herself an expert on Gabriel’s behaviour, but now she was sorely out of practice.

There were earth observation files, but those would do no good. Gabriel would know when he was being watched, and if he wanted to hide something he could. And when it came to tailing an archangel, the demonic photographers of Hell had a habit of ‘getting lost’ for several weeks whenever they tried. It was actually very impressive. 

So even _ if _ Beelzebub asked a minor demon to go see if Gabriel was up to something (and she definitely didn’t; this sort of thing had to be kept out of the official paperwork) it wouldn’t do her any good. No, this was something she was going to have to look into herself.

Being paranoid was a natural response to living in Hell, and it had served Beelzebub well over the years. For one, she was still the Prince, and hadn’t been stabbed in the back neither figuratively nor literally since she ascended to that position. It also kept her consistently one step ahead of Heaven, or at least she liked to think so. Now, her paranoia was beginning to meddle with her, gnawing at the back of her head and telling her to look into Gabriel’s sudden change in behaviour. Well, maybe not _ sudden_, but still enough to set off her suspicions.

He’d lied to her before, which was how she had been able to notice it happening this time. Nothing sinister, of course, just the demands of the job; at some points in their shared history she asked him questions he had absolutely no obligation to answer, and vice versa. But this had nothing to do with God’s plan or Satan’s wishes, this had to do with them. And she was going to figure out what he was up to.

What she would do now, she decided, was give him some time, but not out of respect. She could find him very easily – archangels were meant to be found – so she would just wait for a few days, just in case he suspected her of being snoopy and was guarding his movements. Despite their fumbling unfamiliarity with each other now, she still recalled events in the past where she had been _ convinced _ he had no idea what she was up to, only to walk into a situation and see him waiting there for her.

Not this time.

She lit a cigarette (one of Hell’s top brands: no filters), contemplating what it was he could be up to. Her flies buzzed all around her head, some of them concerned, most of them simply happy to play among the ribbons of smoke as she exhaled.

But… what if it _ was _ something to do with their work? Did Heaven have some kind of plot in furthering the stakes against Hell? If so, she would be impressed, because she was willing to bet it would take Uriel at least fifty years before she had the hang of bossing the other angels around in the same capacity Gabriel could. No, no, it _ had _to be something personal. Maybe he was even trying to just exert a bit of independence, which was fine (well, no, not really).

Her phone dinged. Only mildly curious, she picked it up and was surprised to see a text from Gabriel. Speak of the archangel…

_ Can we talk? _

She texted back. _ Later_.

_ Now. _

She rolled her eyes. _ No_, she said. _ Later_.

After five minutes, he did not text back. Shit. She pondered what else to say when the phone on her desk rang.

Beelzebub glared at it and the flashing red button – telling her it was an inside line – and then answered. “Yes?”

“Lord Beelzebub,” the gravelly voice of one of the many, many demons working security at the front entrance rasped out of the speaker. “You have… a visitor.”

She sighed. “Is that so?”

Her cell phone dinged again.

_ Now. _

Alright, well, maybe she wasn’t going to have to follow him around after all. Maybe his angel-ness would force him to confess everything to her. Or, just as likely, Heaven had sent him and this was an official visit, as rare as they were. In any case, Beelzebub’s only option was to let him in or risk a dozen demons opening their mouths to gossip.

“I’ll send an escort,” she said, and hung up. _Well-played, you feathery bastard._

For obvious reasons, not just any demon could escort Archangel Gabriel to Beelzebub’s office. Technically Gabriel knew the way himself, but to make it look as official and by-the-book as possible, someone important needed to tag along.

She sent Hastur because it was hilarious.

Hastur detested Gabriel. She knew it, Gabriel knew it, and most of Hell knew it. Gabriel had never particularly cared either way so long as he was given the respect owed to him. However, around 700 AD, during a meeting involving twenty of some of Heaven and Hell’s highest ranking officials, Hastur had muttered _ something _ while Gabriel had the floor.

Gabriel had politely coughed, which resulted in a bolt of lightning aimed directly at the toad on Hastur’s head. For Beelzebub, the best part was that Gabriel kept going, so once the smoke had cleared and the ringing in everyone’s ears had abated, Gabriel was _ still _ talking about the Mayans as if he hadn’t even noticed, and Hastur had only been carried out after Gabriel was done, as he didn’t like interruptions.

As it was, Gabriel came into the office with Hastur trailing behind. The archangel had apparently taken the lead at some point during the walk, and that small show of dominance was likely what was causing the angry twitch over Hastur’s left eye.

Beelzebub stood up, because that was what you were supposed to do. “Gabriel here to see you Lord Beelzebub,” Hastur said, unnecessarily. When Hastur was mad he spoke as if he forgot punctuation existed – which, with Hastur, you were never sure.

“Close the door,” Gabriel said, without turning around.

Hastur paused and then, slowly, with great reluctance, shut the door behind him.

He sat down across from her and, just like that, the Gabriel she knew – more relaxed, confident as opposed to domineering – was back. “This must be important,” she remarked.

He nodded, reaching into his coat. “It is,” he said.

In a small, smooth, irritatingly controlled movement, he tossed something onto her desk. It bounced on its side and fell face forward, but she recognized it immediately. Her hand crept towards her shoulder, but she knew before looking that the medal was gone.

All pretenses of this being a business discussion flew out of her head. “Where did you find that?” she asked, puzzled.

Some of Beelzebub’s medals were awards for her misdeeds, but others were… souvenirs of them. Over the years, some of the lesser demons that had tried to threaten her position she would imprison in a decorative shape, locked away as punishment. How one of the medals containing a demon had made it into Gabriel’s possession was not only confusing, it ought to have been impossible.

Gabriel was looking at her in a way she did not like. It was an appraising stare, but without much interest. “A young woman coughed it up,” he said. “After I exorcised the demon containing it from her.”

“You exorcised someone? Isn’t that a bit below your pay grade?”

“Usually,” he said, but he did not explain. She felt her face go hot just from plain irritation. She had managed to forget, somewhere between her fond memories of the past and tackling him onto the bed, just how easily he could get under her skin and annoy, quite literally, the Hell out of her.

“Well,” Beelzebub said, dryly. “Thanks so much for taking time out of your day and returning it.”

Gabriel’s very presence seemed to recoil from her at her tone, but he stood his ground. “Her name is Anathema Device,” he said. “Ring any bells?”

Gabriel’s knowledge of the young seer was even more surprising than him having the medal. What in all of Hell was happening right now? Had Heaven sent him on a fact-finding mission into her affairs? Beelzebub pulled herself together to focus. Anathema Device was part of a deal with Hell and therefore not his concern, so his meddling was not only unwelcome, it could be dangerous and forbidden if he was acting out of his own interests.

_ Kind of like fucking, but you’ve still been doing that, haven’t you? _

“Yes,” she said dismissively, and very solidly ignoring her inner voice. “I met her in a dream, took her to a place in the past. I must have dropped the medal there and she picked it up after I left.”

“You ‘must have’? You mean you don’t know?”

“They have minds of their own, sometimes,” Beelzebub said, frowning, touching her hand to her shoulder again. She counted. Yes, all accounted for now. “This demon saw an opportunity to escape me by going through the past and piggy-backing a witch. Clever.” She was back where she belonged now, though. Thanks to Gabriel. “When did you find it?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Yesterday morning, by California time,” he said. She calculated. Less than twenty-four hours ago. If he was telling her the truth, he’d been dodging her before the exorcism took place. Was it connected or unconnected? Being a Prince of Hell was exhausting enough without Gabriel dragging more problems in. “Where in the past did you take Anathema?”

Beelzebub leaned back in her chair, propping her feet up on the edge of the desk, attempting to regain ownership of the situation. “That,” she said, “is Hell’s business, not yours.”

“Are you serious?”

Beelzebub shrugged. “It’s not like this is anything new, between us.”

Gabriel looked disappointed. “Isn’t it, though?” he asked.

Beelzebub’s heart thudded in her chest, though she wasn’t sure why. “It’s _ work_,” she said. “Why are you so concerned?”

“Right,” Gabriel said. He seemed to be mulling over her answer, and suddenly – suddenly she was feeling very, very worried.

“It’s not important,” she said. “We can-”

“No.”

“What?”

Gabriel shook his head. “I think we’re done,” he said.

Beelzebub bristled, and the flies around her head began to buzz as well. Who did he think he was? He had demanded her time without any leeway, and she could forgive him that this once. But she certainly could not forgive him pushing her around in her own office. “You can’t just demand to come in here, interrupt me, and then decide the conversation is over. That’s not how this works.”

About a thousand years ago the Crusades had happened, and she remembered how Hell had had a real sense of excitement back then. She’d been pleased – nothing quite like a bunch of religious bastards murdering people in a different country in the name of God to really pad out Hell’s numbers – and she had been prepared to crow about it until Gabriel threw something at her.

Instead when she found him in the aftermath of one battle, watching soldiers wading through and finishing off any of the vanquished that were still clinging to life, she hadn’t said anything. She had sat and watched with him and tried not to look directly at his face, which held an expression she could not quite decipher. It wasn’t a sad expression, not really. More one of finality. Not of something decided, but of something ended.

He was wearing it again.

“You misunderstand,” he said. “I am saying _ we _ are done.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> San Gabriel = Saint Gabriel in Spanish, which is what he would have been referred to in Abuela's household.
> 
> Also guys just fyi my typos might get worse. I'm trying not to fret too much over each chapter, which means I'm planning to cut back on editing time to 1. save my sanity and 2. get u ur fic quicklike (hence this quick update)
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoyed this chapter of Beelzebub and Gabriel being the type of 'smart' which just circles back around to 'stupid'. It's not an authentic Fanfic By Shampain™ without a Large Misunderstanding taking place.


	9. records check

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope y'all like sassy angels, nosy coworkers and getting buried under paperwork!

The dream seemed like a long time ago, and it was, in reality – not the dream but the events. She had inhaled the air of a world that no longer existed, even though she knew that even today the trees still stood, the birds still sang, and water still dripped from the leaves and vines.

Anathema’s ancestor prowled through the jungle like a wildcat – either because she was born amidst the trees, or didn’t really exist anymore, Anathema couldn’t tell. In fact the only reason Anathema found her was because she was drawn to her, following the strange flow of destiny that was swirling through the memory, frozen within a jungle that lived and breathed in the present. 

Anathema wished she could speak to the woman and ask her name, but instead she was stuck following her shadow. She felt a strange tickling sensation along her spine, like a spider was making its way up her back. She ignored it.

Beelzebub was there. It wasn’t really a clearing, but a space next to a gurgling stream, likely an offshoot from a bigger, fiercer river some miles away. But the trees parted above them and let the moonlight come through. The sounds of animals chirping and singing and crying out in the darkness was louder, as were the frogs, their calls making the air vibrate.

The woman dipped her hands in the water and splashed some onto her face.

“I heard you want to make a deal,” Beelzebub said. They looked more masculine in the memory, with a sharpness to the shoulders of their military jacket, and tall boots that went up to the knee. Their feet were submerged in the water as they sat on a rock, looking unconcerned at the rising damp. Medals shone and flashed on their shoulders.

Anathema’s ancestor went to Beelzebub, walking upstream, the water spilling around her bare calves and ankles. Bruises were beginning to appear on her skin, visible even in the darkness. “I do,” she said.

“And what is it that you want from it?”

“A beast,” she said, and Anathema shivered. She’d looked for her own beast, four years ago, and had found only a child and his dog. She had been lucky. “A hungry one.”

“You want justice?” Beelzebub asked, raising their eyebrows. “There will be a price to pay; justice is never free.”

“I don’t want justice,” the woman said. “I want revenge. I want each and every person who came to my village to suffer in the same way I have suffered.”

Beelzebub looked interested. “Revenge,” they said, “is more expensive.”

“I’ll pay that price.”

“Are you sure?” Beelzebub looked skeptical, and rose to their feet. They were taller than Anathema’s ancestor, who tipped her chin back to fearlessly meet the demon’s gaze. “The type of creature you want will feed on more than rapists, once it has slept off its gluttony.”

“I didn’t call you here on a whim,” the woman said, and for a moment Beelzebub looked impressed. Her hands smoothed over her rounded stomach. “My mother, father, husband, and baby are all dead. I don’t want whatever else I have to give. Will you make a deal with me?”

“Yes,” Beelzebub said. “Let’s walk, then, and talk business.”

Afterwards, as Anathema walked through the jungle alone, listening to the night and wondering when she was supposed to wake up, she saw something glinting in the loam. Bending to pick it up she noticed it was some kind of military medal. It belonged to Beelzebub, she thought suddenly, looking at it. She ought to bring it back. How to do that, bring something out of a dream?

Without truly knowing or understanding why - unable to realize she was hearing a voice in her head that was not her own - Anathema put it in her mouth and swallowed it. She didn’t remember waking up. She remembered very little, in fact, of everything that had followed until Newt had saved her like he always did. But she remembered walking in the dark with Beelzebub and another witch, listening to their talk, as soft and threatening as a stream with deep undercurrents. She remembered promises being made that she, Anathema, would now have to pay for.

She was safe, for now. She was in her home, with Newt, nestled with him on the couch (he had finally, _finally _slept, as they sat and rewatched movies they could quote from memory). She had been cleansed of evil, she felt renewed; yet the knowledge of what laid before her was a terrible burden.

She would tell Newt, she decided, but not now. Not yet.

.

Getting into Heaven was easy for Gabriel; the trick was not attracting attention.

Of course, were anyone to ask him what he was doing, he could just lie, and they would believe him. But Gabriel was feeling more than done with deceptions of all sorts, so he preferred to try his luck at just getting in and out before anyone noticed him. _Anyone_ being the other archangels in particular.

It made him feel as though there was something illicit about his intentions. Well, since he seemed so damn confused about right and wrong, lately, he wouldn't have been surprised if that were the case.

The exorcism was bothering him. Beelzebub's connection was the most upsetting, but once he had pushed that to the background until it was nothing but a dull ache underneath his lungs (living there by his heart, like some kind of tumour), he could concern himself with the rest of it. Because that, after all, was a lot more palatable to handle than the fact that the person he was in love with was fucking him over and wouldn’t tell him why.

Something involved had made it mandatory for Gabriel to do as he had been bid, and that was frightening. The ability to 'just summon' an archangel should not have been in the purview of any human living, let alone a young man bumbling through an exorcism.

He had hoped asking Beelzebub would open some avenues, but she had been tight-lipped, something which had upset him more than he had thought it would. It had always been that way, and Gabriel had obviously fooled himself into thinking she would respond to him with anything other than secrets. Foolish was apparently his thing now, though, so he was just going to go with it and see where else it led him.

It had been his task to figure out what had gone wrong with the Apocalypse, but he found himself less and less concerned with each passing day. The worst part about examining the world was the unfortunate side effect of accidentally examining himself.

The angel working behind the entry at the Records desk, dressed head to toe in snowy white, seemed not to care about anything, let alone Gabriel and his request. “Eighth floor,” he said, shoving the piece of paper with the file number at him, before getting back to, presumably, something more interesting than an archangel.

The Records building was huge. Gabriel was glad to see that the filing system Michael had half-implemented did not extend to the records they kept on human souls; also that the building was almost empty, save for a handful of other angels perusing for their own work. Gabriel knew that now he was in there he would be left in peace, because only an idiot would interrupt or even approach him – mostly because having a conversation with Gabriel was widely considered to be a punishment. Being unlikable was how Gabriel had managed to get himself some amount of peace and quiet every now and then. He liked to think he was doing it on purpose, but he was starting to figure probably not.

Locating the file was the main issue. While Heaven was technically on a system very similar to human computer software, the physical copies of the records were the ones with the real information, and had to be accessed in person to be read. It was an incredibly finicky system that Gabriel had never bothered to fix himself, mostly because when it came to reorganizing filing systems or doing literally anything else, Gabriel chose the latter.

The records were constantly being mislabelled and put elsewhere, so Gabriel hoped he would at least be able to find what he needed where it was supposed to be, and would not waste half a day tracking it down. It took some digging but he was able to locate Anathema Device’s file on the correct shelf, pulling it down and flipping it open to the newest page.

His actions had already been logged.

_Friday, July Nineteenth, 06:53 Exorcism From On High (reg. Gabriel, angel, Archangel) (rai. canonized, patronage) (add. #432DE65F3)_

There. That was it. He had to follow that number. As he suspected, his call to the exorcism was connected to an earlier incident, one that had jumped its way through the ages and been buried somehow. He would have to move into the Archives, now. If he was lucky, he would find the source in the past half century. _If_, and he rarely was. “Well, bad luck has never stopped me before,” he said aloud, dryly.

He discovered he should have kept his mouth shut.

The angel manning the point of entry to Archives was not quite so easy to deal with as the last one. She wore ivory with a vivid red scarf that made her look like she was decapitated. Pale-faced and blue-eyed, she surveyed Gabriel from the other side of the countertop-slash-desk that was her domain.

“Yeah?” she asked.

“I need a list of all records associated with file #432DE65F3.”

She blinked, nodded, and then rapid-touch typed it into her computer, still maintaining eye contact. Only when the computer beeped did she look at her screen before pulling a face.

“Access-per-angel tops out at twenty separate records per work cycle,” she said.

“And?”

“And you are requesting access to eighty-six files in the Heavenly Archives,” she said. “So, you know. _Hell no_ as they say.”

“You do realize who I am, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, easily. “Everyone knows who the archangels are, especially the hot ones. But that’s eighty-six freaking files, you know? So. No.”

Gabriel tapped his fingers against the desktop in some consternation. This was the problem with Heaven: layers and layers of needless complications. He didn’t mind it most days, because most days he could just throw his weight around and get what he wanted done. But even he had to bow down to the bureaucracy every now and then.

“Well,” he said. “Really I’m just trying to access _one_ file, but I can’t know which one until I get through all the others. Unless you happen to have a proper dating system installed on that computer to show me to the file with the earliest creation date?”

She didn’t even bother to check. “We definitely don’t. Despite, you know, me repeatedly asking for one.”

“Is it possible for you to give me a list of the files, and I won’t _officially_ look at them except checking the date? Yes?”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s possible.”

“And?”

“Will you contact HR and move my vacation request up?”

“Are you asking for a bribe?”

“I’m asking for you to move my vacation request up,” she said, putting her elbows to the desk, lacing her fingers together and cradling her chin in them. She gave him a mix between a pout and a smile. “Pretty please?”

Sometimes Gabriel envied Beelzebub’s position in Hell. Somehow he doubted even demons could surpass the deviousness of an angelic drone buried beneath paperwork. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll send along a sharp note.”

It took hours upon hours of combing through each and every file and arranging them all in a mental timeline. The twelfth file he opened was created in 1612, so he knew for a fact he was in for the long haul. But then, finally, after comparing it to all eighty-five others, he found it: the oldest file, created 1524.

At the desk, the angel of the Archives was clearly about to head out. She eyed the file tucked under his arm with suspicion and misgivings. “Archives opens again in nine hours.”

“You know what I’m about to ask, don’t you?” She opened her mouth, no doubt to tell him it was a pipe dream, when he added, very honestly, “Please?”

“Augh.” But he saw the defeat in her face.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Yeah, alright,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Give me a minute, I’ll get the forms ready. Just for Heavenly use or are you bringing them to Earth?”

“Earth.”

“You’re fucking killing me, man,” she muttered, but she still turned the printer back on.

Before he left Heaven, he stopped back at Records to grab a few more files to study, just in case anyone went poking their nose into his business. It turned out to be a good idea; as he was leaving a few higher-ranking angels loitering by one of the break rooms caught sight of him, but he was able to just nod at their surprised looks before passing by.

Back at his apartment – and the relative privacy of Earth – he dumped all of the files down on his desk and started sorting them. He had selected records on a handful of individuals associated with the botched end of the world, though in Crowley and Aziraphale’s case he had only selected a section (angels and demons’ files were massive, and usually sorted by date; Gabriel grabbed the ones pertaining to the last one hundred years). He had no intention in reading them, but it was good just to throw anyone off the scent of what he was actually doing if they checked up on him.

That done, he turned to the dustiest, most worn, forgotten record. He sat down at his desk and began to go through, eyes scanning for something, anything, to explain what was happening. And then, in 1542, he saw it:

_March Eleventh, 01:26 Life Restored - 6 Hour Window (reg. Beelzebub, demon, Prince) (rai: underwriting, insurance, contractual obligations) (con.ob.add. #432DE65F3 INFERNAL)_

Gabriel’s mouth went dry. It wasn't a file number after all; it was the number registered to a contract. A contract Beelzebub had written out personally.

Demons didn't make contracts longer than twenty years these days. This one seemed to have been active for centuries, which meant it was tied to a human bloodline – the one he’d just been pawing through all day. Few such contracts existed now, as they had only been in vogue for a certain period of time before petering off. Most had been completed, but there were a few lost in the paperwork.

The thing with the records in Heaven was that they were always an incomplete picture. While souls were on the earthly plane, they had files in both Heaven and Hell. Once they died, however, the surplus file would transfer up (or down, depending) to its partner and leave only the bare bones behind. Contracts were even more difficult, only housed in the Archives of whoever wrote it. Even if he forced his way through the procedures to request to see this one, Hell would refuse it, or he would receive the contract with half of the pertinent information blacked out. Beelzebub would be sure to see to that, considering how unwilling she had been to speak with him about it.

He shook his head, then went back to the beginning of the file. He read of the woman’s birth, of her childhood, and then adulthood. He read about how she fell in love with a man who sang to the birds in the trees, called them down to land on his shoulders. Then he read about the slaughter of him and half of her village by Spanish invaders in 1542, of her being beaten and raped, of the half-formed child in her womb that could not survive the trauma. The events were listed in order of how they happened, in a cold, black type, without feeling. These were events, nothing more.

He read about how she called out to a prince of demons in the nighttime, and that Beelzebub had answered. She had signed a contract. And then, almost two hours after midnight, she felt the baby kick again. She travelled north and eventually gave birth. She found another husband. She became a fearsome witch doctor, helping some and harming others. She lived to fifty-five, and when she died she went to Hell, it seemed, with no regrets.

His phone rang.

“Uriel,” he answered. “What can I do?”

“Were you up in Heaven today?” Uriel sounded puzzled and amused, but Gabriel thought he heard something else underneath her tone. Suspicion. “I heard a rumour you were in Records.”

“I was, yes,” he said.

“For what?”

The reason why Gabriel had wanted to avoid the archangel flock, as it were, was because they were all nosy. Himself included, admittedly – though Gabriel’s saving grace had been that his managerial style involved maintaining at least some distance, as he had never been particularly interested in what anyone got up to unless it was something that concerned his work. The rest of the angels, though, seemed to thrive on looking in on everyone else, and while before Gabriel did not care at all what anyone knew about his business, he found he had something to lose now: privacy. How strange that desiring it felt like breaking the rules.

“For what I’m working on,” he said, letting real exasperation creep into his voice. He didn’t like being questioned, especially now that he had something he wanted to keep to himself. “I am _busy_, Uriel, as I have told you. Is there anything I can do for you?”

The sharpness had the right affect: Uriel calmed down immediately. “Yes, that’s what I thought,” she said. “I was just wondering if there was something you needed help with.”

“I’m more than capable of working alone right now,” he said, “but if I need anything more you’ll be the first I call, alright?”

“Not Sandalphon?” she teased.

“_Goodbye_, Uriel,” Gabriel said, and hung up on her laugh. “You’d think after two centuries he’d have given up by now,” he muttered to himself.

He went back to the file. He read it three more times, even though he had it memorized after the first read. It was bothering him. Something in that contract spelt trouble for him, and it, like Beelzebub herself, remained out of his reach.

Unwillingly, his eyes strayed to the other files on the desk. He hadn’t had any intention to actually read them but, curious – needing to distract himself, let his mind start working through what he already knew like a computer running a background systems check – he selected Aziraphale’s and checked the last few pages.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gabriel is slowly taking over this story and it's annoying af.


	10. 1365

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Bhang_: an edible preparation of cannabis originating from the Indian subcontinent  
_Hampi_: the centre of the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire capital in the 14th century  
_Beelzebub_: sad, angry demon

Beelzebub had not known what to do, and after several millennia of being in charge of the hordes of Hell it was not a situation she was used to. But Gabriel had been adamant, and he also hadn’t wasted time; he took his leave almost immediately after deciding to end things, leaving Beelzebub sitting in her office. She had not reacted: simply kept her gaze on his, trying to discern if he was serious or not. And in that moment she had lost the advantage, and he was gone before she could intercept him.

_You hurt him_, a small, vicious voice teased inside of her head. _He’s wounded. You don’t even need to go in for the kill; he’ll bleed out eventually._

“Shut up,” she whispered to herself.

Maybe that was just the way she was, as a demon. She couldn’t help it. Anything she might love was injured in the course of her desire, or perhaps she was just more of a predator than she thought she was. In any case, it could be considered a victory for Hell, damaging Gabriel the way she had, but Beelzebub didn’t give two fucks about Hell at that point. Not anymore.

All of her fucks, she realized, with mounting panic, were for Gabriel. Without realizing it she had placed all of her cares on him and then, after all of that, she had made an even bigger mistake: she had taken him for granted. If that had been the first time she’d done it, well, there was a lesson to be learned in that. But it wasn’t the first time, it was the second, and now Gabriel’s absence might be more permanent, and… and Beelzebub was a fool.

_He’s safer without you_, the voice reminded her. _Just let him be_.

It made sense. If she was going to hurt him anyway she may as well steer clear. Beelzebub forced down her rising panic, went back to work. She did not move from her desk for nearly forty-eight hours. Even Dagon, who reminded her that even a Prince of Hell might need a lunch break, quickly ran out of the office when Beelzebub threw a stapler at her.

_He _is_ safer without me_, she thought. God may have stopped paying attention to the world – Beelzebub was convinced, after the botched Apocalypse, that God had always planned to do the existential version of dropping the mic and walking offstage, wherever offstage happened to be – but that still didn’t protect them from the consequences of messing with the natural order. Crowley and Aziraphale seemed to be an aberration, but that didn’t leave room for anyone else.

Aziraphale and Crowley. Why did they get to have whatever they took? Beelzebub had done nothing but bend over backwards for Hell for her entire demonic existence and still she came up short of her wants. She had never discussed the pair of them with Gabriel, but she wondered if he had thought about it too – certainly while Aziraphale and Crowley’s liaison was something of a secret, it was not a particularly well-kept one. Most demons considered it to be conjecture and rumour.

But you didn’t team up with your mortal enemy and stop the Apocalypse unless extreme love or absolute hate was involved. And Beelzebub knew Crowley well enough to know that, whatever else he might attempt, her former employee couldn’t truly hate anyone.

_So just let it be_, Beelzebub told herself. And she laboured under that idea for those forty-eight excruciating hours where she did her job even though she wished she could just explode at any minute and end her terrible existence, at least temporarily. And then as she opened envelopes with a dagger stolen from Hitler’s collection she accidentally cut her hand open.

The longer Beelzebub spent in Hell, the more her surface skin would begin to rot. She wore the image of her physical body, generally, but the atmosphere in Hell tended to corrupt it after some time. She sliced right through a sore, pus as well as blood rising immediately to the surface.

It made Beelzebub remember something, a sensation so ingrained it slammed into her. She grabbed a handful of tissues and clumped them in her hand, not thinking straight enough to remember she could just magic it healed. Her mind was racing, flipping through the pages of her memory, year to year, decade to decade. How could she have forgotten?

She’d hurt Gabriel, and she had no idea how, but it had made him draw away. The last time she had taken him for granted she’d sworn never again, and then when she made the exact same mistake, there she was responding in the exact same way: by just letting him go.

Well, she was fucking tired of that.

She burst out of her office with enough force (literally flinging the door against the wall) that Dagon actually shrieked in surprise, and Beelzebub had not heard Dagon do anything but a sensible snicker in five hundred years.

“I’m off,” Beelzebub announced, still clutching a handful of bloody tissues. “You can stay or go. I don’t care.”

Dagon’s annoyed expression from being startled morphed into pleasure. “And when will you be back?”

“Don’t know.”

“You have meetings.”

They looked at each other, then Dagon started the aforementioned snickering, “Alright,” she said. A regular office on earth would have cancelled those meetings, but this was Hell, where inconveniencing people was second nature.

Beelzebub left by the front entrance, choosing where it deposited her – out on the streets of Zurich. She needed to make a stop at a bank.

Every now and then even demon princes and holy archangels got a day or two off. Beelzebub enjoyed her rare times with Gabriel, who would do almost anything if Beelzebub said ‘please’. This was a trick she had learned in the first few thousand years, and she put it to good use whenever she had a chance. This time, she requested a trip to Hampi.

Even so it wasn’t difficult to sway him; one of Gabriel’s favourite drinks was made with bhang, a milky concoction they could purchase at street markets or in the shaded cafes of the city, and his taste for it bordered on the inappropriate. They could get it in other places, of course, in different forms, but Hampi was entertaining to visit. In two hundred years it would be looted and pillaged for six months following war, leaving it to turn to ruins. In 1365, though, the city glittered like a jewel.

They had been drinking all day. Palm wine, mostly, but bhang as well. It made the both of them looser, more relaxed, and easily amused. Despite that, they were kicked out of three separate establishments for being unruly, because no matter how pleasant Gabriel could be, Beelzebub was Beelzebub, and her habit of tricking people into getting into fistfights for her own amusement was bad for business.

They sat on the steps of a quiet side street. Night had fallen and they were alone, having eschewed the bustling avenues for relative peace closer to residences. In any case they had a jug of palm wine between them and had purchased more bhang, this time as an edible, and were chewing it thoughtfully.

“Do you ever think about killing me?” Gabriel asked, suddenly.

Beelzebub had started laughing, finding the question both incongruous and hilarious. “Yes,” she said, when she had finally calmed down. “Yes, all the time. You’re fucking annoying.”

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head. Strangely enough he seemed to find her reaction amusing. “I mean when the end comes. Do you ever think about that?”

For a moment, Beelzebub thought she had just sobered herself up by accident. What a question, _what a fucking question_. She hated him for asking it but at the same time she was impressed, because, she was certain, she herself never would have been able to voice it out loud. Of course she had thought about it. Of course it had occurred to her. It was the nightmare that was her own reality, unstoppable and inevitable. They didn’t know when it would happen, but they both knew it would.

“No,” she lied.

He probably believed her, which was awful. Even after all that time it was difficult to tell him the truth when it really mattered.

A little smile appeared on his face, the kind of smile that suggested he might be thinking two things at once; which of the two would he tell her? “Because you think you'll win, I suppose,” he said.

“I know we will,” Beelzebub said, scrambling gratefully towards the diversion. She should have known better.

“Then I suppose someone will be killing me anyway.”

“Well, not me. Because I can't afford to lose to you. No one in Hell would take me seriously ever again.”

He grinned. “So true,” he said. He leaned his elbow on his knee, cradling his chin in his palm. “You shouldn’t fight Michael,” he added, almost to himself.

“No?”

“He’s very strong.”

Beelzebub felt a flash of irritation, but when she spoke she surprised herself at what, apparently, had annoyed her. “You are too,” she said.

He didn't say it. He didn't say _I'd just let you win_, but the threat of it was there. Some things just could not be said, even as an attempt at humour. Some things would damn you as soon as you uttered them. Beelzebub heard the words, unspoken in the air, and then was suddenly terrified when she realized she felt the same, could even shape the words on her lips, let them fall if she wasn't careful. _I__'d let you win_.

“Sometimes,” he said, mildly.

She didn’t think. She just put her hands to Gabriel’s face, turning his head towards hers, and kissed him.

It lasted only a second or two; in fact it was nothing but the chastest of kisses. Beelzebub didn’t understand, because she expected to feel what she always did in the face of her desires: ravenous. Instead as soon as she had decided to do it the world had gone a bit faint at the edges, soft and gentle like a dream, and she had stilled to a preternatural calmness.

“Oh,” he said. He was surprised, but not overly so; actually if the crinkling around his eyes was any indication, he was pleased.

They both spoke at once.

“Sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“_Thank you_?” she sputtered, and began to laugh just as he did. Beelzebub had no idea how stoned the both of them had been, but it, like the drunkenness, had been a gentle hum below the surface of their conversation. It didn't really count.

“Well,” he said, when they had both calmed down. “Yes. Thank you.”

“Sounds like I gave you a gift.”

“You did,” he said, and she felt a shiver go up her spine. The world was still soft and dreamy, and she could feel the night air on her skin, sense the warmth radiating from him.

“You're welcome, then,” she said, staring at his mouth for a moment, then picking up the wine jug from the step, using it to fill their shared cup. She offered it to him to take the first sip, and then when he gave it back she drained it.

The tension of the earlier conversation had evaporated and instead a giddiness filled her stomach. These were things she could not experience with anyone else, she knew. No human or demon or even another angel; just Gabriel. And the night was beautiful, and they could hear the sounds of a celebration perhaps a street or two away, and Beelzebub needed to distract herself from kissing him again. She could not think of _why_ it was a bad idea because at the moment everything had seemed possible, but a part of her knew she needed to heed her urges. “You should give _me_ something, then,” she said, refilling the cup.

He considered that, leaning his elbows back onto the steps and stretching his legs out. “I suppose that makes sense.”

“It better be good,” she said, drinking from the cup.

“There's not many things I can give.”

“Let's go to the night market and find something.”

“No, I don't want to leave here,” he said, meditatively, and she smiled into her wine.

For a moment she thought he was stretching, because he shifted, back curving slightly, one arm reaching around the back of his head. The was a shift and a rustle, impossible for the human ear to hear, but to a demon it was the sound of night falling. Then Gabriel was holding one of his feathers in his hand, long and slender in the dark. He handed it to her.

She raised her eyebrows at it, as if he'd literally picked up a rock and given it to her. Angel wings weren't really wings, so it wasn't really a feather she was holding, though it looked just like one. “You know I have tons of these, myself?” she asked, dryly.

“This one's different.”

“I don't need a token, Gabriel.” The archangel, she thought, was much like one of those birds who hoarded shiny things, except he liked to give _her_ the shiny things instead of keeping them for himself. A medallion, a game piece, that blasted blue shell. Even, once, a large beetle with a shiny blue-black shell that he placed on the back of her hand. Every time she got rid of all of it immediately, except for the beetle, which they both had watched with interest for a good fifteen minutes before it finally trundled away. She had been joking about him giving her something and, in true Gabriel fashion, he'd gone for a trinket.

In fact she was about to crumple it up in her hand in her usual feigned disinterest, which usually made him laugh, when he said, “It's a favour. It can become whatever you want.”

“I can do that myself,” she said. “Wish for anything.”

He laughed as if she still didn't get it – and she supposed she didn't. “I know,” he said. “But for this you don't _have_ to do anything. It's a miracle, Beelzebub.”

A miracle as an object, a miracle from Gabriel to Beelzebub, and the gravity of it dawned on her. If she wished for something terrible, then it would be his work and his fault. And he had simply handed it to her. She stared at it now, not as if it were a rock, but Pandora's fucking box. “You're drunk,” she said, with an unsteady laugh, pushing the feather back at him. Her palms had started to sweat.

“Yes,” he agreed, but did not take it back.

“You're an idiot,” she said, beginning to scowl, growing annoyed with him and his imperturbable holiness, but her heart was squeezing in her chest all the same. “You know I could do something terrible with this. Then you'd be in so much shit.”

He smiled. “You won't,” he said, pouring more wine into the cup she had abandoned.

“Take it back.”

“Absolutely not.”

“It's too much,” she confessed, and he finally did look away from the wine and at her. She didn't need light, she could see in the dark. Without illumination his eyes had a strange darkness to them that was alive and comforting, like a star-strewn sky. She had simply kissed him, once; for that she didn't deserve something so precious as a miracle, benign or otherwise, from him or anyone else.

His starry gaze did not waver from hers. What did her eyes look like to him, in that dark street? “Kiss me again, then,” he said, “and maybe we'll be even.”

The bank manager let her into the room and left. Beelzebub had a permanent note in her file that she refused to be spoken to, ever since she had opened the account centuries ago. The company was so worried about losing her impossibly eternal business that it regulated her wishes like a law of nature.

Alone, she walked over to the wall vault and put in her code, inserted her key, turned it. Behind the steel she could hear mechanical movement, of safe boxes being sorted and shifted forward. The door opened and she retrieved a dull black box, strangely heavy for its size and shape, bringing it over to the table in the middle of the room.

She opened it. There, nestled on a pile of velvet, was Gabriel's miracle.

It was a stormy grey colour with the lush hint of a deep bruise, and it gleamed like spilt gasoline in the bank's artificial lighting. And since it was an angel feather, it did not feel like the feather of a bird. It felt like ocean water. It felt like the prickle of static, the pleasure of a cut without the pain of a wound.

It felt like she had cut her hand open with a dagger, just as she had an hour ago.

Beelzebub stroked it in silence, remembering the moment when she had decided to lock it away, there on earth. She had been labouring under false pretenses even then. It wasn't that it was her most prized possession, but it was the most dangerous, or so she liked to tell herself. She never should have had it to begin with, but it had been freely given and thus, it was hers, and she would not relinquish it.

Over the years, though – and now more painfully obvious to her than ever – she had saved it for one single and indisputable reason: when the world came to its end and Hell won, the feather would have been the last piece of Gabriel left.

Armageddon had collapsed, though, and the world, however uncertain, was changed. There was no way she was going to settle for just a feather.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess that whole 'quick and fast' update shit isn't happening. OH WELL.  
I'm by no means an expert on Ancient India or the historical use of cannabis. All I really know is people have been getting stoned for millennia, probably for as long as they've been getting drunk, which, if you ask any botanist, I'm sure they'd agree.  
I used 'bhang' as an umbrella term for both a drink and a food. From what I could dig up, at least in that part of the world it was always consumed as an edible as opposed to smoked. 
> 
> earlier mentions of 1365 in this fic so you don't have to dig:  
Chapter 5: 'Gabriel had not consumed alcohol since around the tail end of the fourteenth century. He had gotten so drunk and belligerent that God had forced him to experience the hangover [...] Or, rather, Gabriel assumed he must have been belligerent, since he had very little recollection of what had happened. He did remember it had mostly been Beelzebub’s fault, though, as that had been back in the days where they had seen more of each other.'
> 
> Chapter 6: 'There was a reason she’d started to give Hastur the majority of her workload on Earth, and it wasn’t just because Gabriel had pulled away from her after that disastrous night in 1365.'
> 
> Also, I want to mention that I haven't been replying to comments lately. I just feel really overwhelmed at the moment but please, please, PLEASE KNOW I reread them often and they help me with a lot more than just my writing, so thank you thank you thank you. Thanks for being here <3


	11. let the games begin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *crashes through your wall like the kool-aid man* TIME FOR AN UPDATE YAAAAA

Her mother and grandmother had finally left that morning, two days after the exorcism, convinced that everything was well. Grandma had been insistent on trying to figure out how Anathema had managed to become possessed, but Rosa had put her foot down with her mother during the second round of questions. “_People get_ _possessed_, mama, it’s not something they go out and _do_,” she had snapped. Anathema, who had rarely seen her mother get worked up about anything, had been stunned and impressed. She almost regretted the truth: that her own actions _had_ led to the possession.

But to reveal that would be to reveal everything else, and Anathema had no intention in doing that. The only person she would be telling – for now – was Newt.

The thing about Newt was that he had an unimpressed opinion of himself. He didn’t think badly of his worth, but there was a sense of acceptance, an ‘I am what I am and it will never be enough and that’s fine’ mentality. What bothered Anathema was that she would have thought very similarly of him had fate, and Agnes, not thrown them together.

Being with Newt, Anathema understood that what the world saw as valuable within people was… well, it was a construct of the capitalist class. Despite her very left-leaning views she _was_ the progeny of tech investors and had grown up within that sphere of influence, and she had not escaped from the clutches of the productivity mindset. Newt was not productive; but that didn’t make him unimportant, or boring, or not worthwhile.

He knew something was going on. He paid attention to Anathema – he was a man of singular focus, and he noticed things. But he did not press her. Sometimes she caught him looking at her and, almost guiltily, he would look away, as if the very pressure of his gaze was somehow pushing her beyond what she was willing. Without speaking, though, they managed to come to an accord; and that morning after Rosa and Grandma had left and their apartment returned to its tranquil, pre-demonic state, they sat down at the kitchen table to talk.

Anathema had with her a notebook, some pens, some blank card stock, and a tablet. Newt also had a notebook. As her psychic abilities had begun to blossom they had often sat down together to puzzle out signs and symbols. There was a lot of googling. Still, the air between them was tense; even though Newt couldn’t know what she was about to tell him, he suspected that it was not going to be good news.

“I’ve been getting… clues, all year,” she said. He nodded, listening raptly. As soon as he started asking questions she would get derailed, so she did her best to focus her thoughts, give him the most complete picture she could in one go. “Something is going to happen on our wedding day. It would happen whether we were getting married or not. That’s just…” she took a breath. “That’s the date. It just worked out that way. I don’t know why. And I didn’t know what was going to happen, just that certain people needed to be there, so I’ve just been piecing it all together, making arrangements.”

Of course, Newt already knew that part; he was the one helping to sort out her thoughts _and_ the guest list. “Focus on what you do know,” he encouraged.

She nodded, looked down at her half-scribbled notes. Bits of dreams she only vaguely recalled, written there sloppily while she was still mostly asleep, swam on the page in front of her. “I had an ancestor who made a deal with a demon,” she said. “It was to get revenge on people who had wronged her and her people. The other night, I dreamed of it. I mean – I went there. I saw the meeting. I looked at the contract. So now I finally know what’s going to happen.”

“Okay,” Newt said, slowly, noting the very unhappy look on her face. “So… is it going to be, like, a volcano? A tsunami? Is a crater going to open up and swallow the whole wedding party?”

“I’m serious, Newt.”

“So am I,” he said, reaching across the table for her. She took his hand, felt him gently squeeze her fingers. Suddenly, the thought of what was to come – that he would be ripped from her, his hand torn from hers – terrified her. She pulled back sharply.

_If he doesn’t marry me, then maybe he’ll be safe_, she thought.

“Anathema, what is it?” he asked, a frown creasing his forehead.

“A monster,” she blurted out. “It’s going to come and it’s… it’s going to devour every single member of my family. And me.”

Silence.

Outside, they heard the soft sounds of traffic. The dishwasher, which they had started after her family had left, gurgled gently in the background.

“Huh,” Newt said. “And me as well, I suppose.”

“Well-”

“Anathema, you are _not_ breaking up with me now,” Newt said, having followed her train of thought quite easily and, reaching the end, disagreeing wholeheartedly. “I’m marrying you even if it’s the last thing I do. I mean, with your consent,” he added, hastily. “I would never imply-”

“Newt, _come on_,” Anathema groaned. “You can’t just say you’ll marry me and stay with me in sickness and in health and then just get gobbled up by an eldritch monster right after.”

“Why not?” he asked, seriously. “How is this any different from the certain death we faced the day we met?”

“That was the end of the world-”

“Yeah, so if you think about it, this one has a lot less pressure,” he said, encouragingly. “And we got out of that, didn’t we?”

She couldn’t believe her ears. He was actually suggesting they could _do_ something about it-

Wait. Could they?

She opened her mouth, shut it, then opened it again when she had managed to unscramble her thoughts. “Do you really think so?” she asked, hesitant. She wanted to think Newt was just putting on a show for her, as that would bring her peace of mind, but instead she had the suspicion he was completely serious.

“Yes,” he said, frankly. “After what’s happened to us, we can do anything together.”

“We had Agnes back then.”

“And now _you’re_ an oracle,” he said. “You’re better than Agnes. I don’t know why we keep having to go over this. You’ve always been more than some book.”

She laughed, still partially horrified by his cavalier attitude towards her ancestor, but to her credit she had become less precious towards Agnes these days since she had set fire to her legacy… even though it had set her entire world adrift. “I don’t think I agree,” she said. “But we can try.”

He was nodding. “Good,” he said. “We’ll try. And uh. Do that. So what did the contract say about… the beast? Monster? What is it exactly?”

“It’s a type of demon,” Anathema said, consulting her notes. Her stomach was churning with fear but her head, for the first time since she had woken up from the exorcism, felt clear. “I couldn’t really read it, but it looked like it said it was a ‘demagorgon’ which is-”

“Like in-“

“_Not_ like in _Stranger Things_.”

“I had to ask,” he said, raising his hands up in surrender at her glare.

“Anyway,” she said, mollified. “It’s probably not the right translation. I’ve been looking it up and apparently it’s just… a _word_ that came into common language through the years. So I don’t really know what kind of demon it may be. Just that it’s big. And hungry.”

“Okay,” Newt said, slowly. “So we’ve got our wedding, and some sort of demon is going to show up and start eating all of us. And – hang on, didn’t your ancestor _care_ about that? That’s kind of selfish.”

She sighed. “In her defense,” she said, “she thought her bloodline was over. She was pregnant but it wasn’t alive anymore, because of what happened to her. And I don’t think she planned to have another one.”

Newt looked appropriately shamefaced. “Oh, I see,” he said. “So what happened?”

“I think Lord Beelzebub brought the baby back to life,” Anathema said. “That’s the sort of thing Hell seems to do whenever it writes a contract.”

“Kicks you in the arse for trying to outwit them?”

“Yeah, that.”

“And isn’t Lord Byellzwhat invited to our wedding?”

“I think that might be why they made it onto the guest list in the first place, yes.”

Newt had a glimmer in his eye. “Well, why don’t we go through all the unusual people we invited?” he suggested. “We invited them for a reason, right?”

“Like San Gabriel,” Anathema said, slowly, adding the honorific without thinking, some of her Abuela’s religious respect lingering. Why him? And why Beelzebub? How strange that she had already come across them when the world was about to end, there on the tarmac at the airbase, only for them to already be tied into her bloodline the way they were. Lord Beelzebub as a demon responsible for a curse to blight her bloodline, and the Archangel Gabriel, whose patronage had steered the family clear in their many communication-related investments… and who had answered a plea for help from Newt.

(Well, that solidified Newt’s status in the family, then, if he could manage something like that, marriage or no marriage.)

Newt, however, was beginning to write down names, unaware of the ticking in Anathema’s brain. “There’s Mr Fell and Mr Crowley,” he was saying, because Newt had yet to get over the two of them not being the weird, middle-aged lovers they appeared to be and calling them by their singular names. “We could probably ask them about the demagorgon. Adam? No. He’s not the Antichrist anymore. And actually I always thought he was a little too young to have to deal with all of that, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” Anathema said. She could feel her eyes starting to glaze over as her brain began to twist and turn, and sensed Newt’s attention zeroing in on her. It was as if her mind was making shadow puppets on the walls, and she was desperately trying to decipher the shapes. Numbers… numbers were forming.

“Did I miss something?” she heard him ask, as if far away.

Her lips moved, testing each number. Then she nodded. “Hand me my phone, please?” she requested, pulling herself back to the present.

What did you do when the one person in the entire universe you had feelings for, arranged for your death?

That was all Gabriel was seeing from the piles of evidence. Beelzebub’s actions were not just a form of betrayal; they were vicious. For the first time in his existence Gabriel doubted his knowledge of the demon. Could she really do this to him? The facts were there, right in front of him. Well, in front of all of them, because he stood looking at what Newt was calling ‘their conspiracy board’, which had taken up the better part of the living room wall. For now, though, it was just Gabriel.

The two humans had long ago gone to sleep, leaving him standing there in the living room, deep in contemplation. He had not expected the call, when it had come; but Anathema was turning out to be a very powerful seer as well as psychic, and one who was able to fly under the radar without Heaven or Hell trying to scramble the messages in her brain. Or – and this was what Gabriel found most unsettling – perhaps Heaven or Hell was exactly where the messages were coming from. In any case, she had wanted to ask him a few questions, and in response he had dragged himself out of his morose stupor over Beelzebub and gone back to California.

Anathema had recreated the contract for him, as best she could from her memories, and he had helped fill in the bits that were par for the course in Hellish deals. Neither she nor Newt had asked him why he was helping, perhaps because they were worried that such a question would cause him to withdraw his aid. Or maybe Anathema already knew. But she had requested help and, even if Gabriel had not felt an internal tug telling him to obey, he would have gone anyway. He wanted, _needed_, to understand what was happening.

His original goal of going to Earth, of understanding what had gone wrong during the Apocalypse, was no longer of any interest to him. It had already begun to wane, slightly, but now he was no longer concerned with the big picture or the greater good or even what Heaven was supposed to do now. He just wanted to know how badly he had fucked up, and how he was about to be punished for it.

Things had changed after 1365. Beelzebub had kept her distance after his duties had been changed, and he had always assumed it was because, after dealing with him for so long, she had realized he wasn't as entertaining as she thought he was. She certainly seemed less jovial in subsequent meetings, and so Gabriel had decided to accept the new normal and move on. It was safer that way; the feelings he experienced around Beelzebub had begun to grow dangerously rampant. Better to forget about them entirely.

And then Armageddon hadn't happened and Beelzebub seemed to change her mind. _Too good to be true_, he might have thought, had he not been so busy thinking about what might happen if Heaven found out. But now it reeked of a scheme. Why else would Beelzebub suddenly seduce him, after over six thousand years, not to mention several centuries of barely seeing one another?

Had something happened that night in Hampi? Had he _done_ something to her in his blinding drunkenness, something he had managed to forget alongside most everything else from that night? Was this all part of some long con, a revenge scheme? It was not beyond her abilities or whims. Beelzebub was devious, and she always made a point of letting him know it.

In front of him they had tacked up all information Gabriel had confirmed as correct or likely correct from their sifting through of books and the internet. Humans were rather good at compiling information about Hell, though they had a tendency to also make a few things up. (Or forget them. Or just hallucinate and think it was real.) In any case, Gabriel just had to point to the right things, and Newt dutifully pinned them up, all while what he knew of the contract was churning in his mind.

Contracts tended to follow a similar format, and Anathema’s story of her ancestor fit into the one he had read in his own files. It was a classic case of asking Hell for help with revenge only to have it backfire on the dealmaker. And Gabriel too, it turned out.

He was the patron saint of the Devices, and while it was true that they were not the only family under his care, they were, in fact, the first family to actually _require_ celestial help to the point where if they asked for it he had to go. Listening to prayers, granting a few wishes, pointing someone in the right direction; those were all little things he could multitask with ease. This was different. With an entire clan threatened, it was Gabriel’s heavenly duty to protect them.

And what he had to protect them from, even Gabriel couldn’t formulate an exact picture. He’d never seen a hellbeast of the type described in the contract, but he’d heard stories – all deeply terrible. He was an archangel, yes, but this was a creature from the literal bowels of Hell, where they were always locked away because it was only slightly less dangerous to contain them than it was to let them loose.

Shit. _Fuck_. He was so fucked.

Newt woke with most of Anathema’s hair in his face; she had been tossing and turning in her sleep and thrown it over him like a blanket. He managed to slide out of bed without disturbing her, stumbling into the hall before remembering that they might still have Gabriel as a house guest; he turned and went immediately back to the bedroom to grab a robe. He was _not_ going to be walking around in boxers in front of someone who was a. an archangel and b. looked like he belonged on the cover of GQ.

Well, except for the bit where he looked weirdly… sleepless. Newt was not an expert on angels or demons but he figured he had more than a casual layman’s knowledge of them now, and he was pretty sure that was a bit unusual.

What was even more unusual was when he was in the kitchen making coffee – he had peeked into the living room and, sure enough, Gabriel was still standing there contemplating the Wall From Hell, not having moved since they said goodnight to him – and a phone started going off. It was not his, and he didn’t think it was Anathema’s, unless she’d changed her ringtone. Following the noise, he found it sitting on the kitchen table. It was Gabriel’s.

The caller ID was a picture of Crowley, messily eating a bowl of noodles.

“What?” he muttered, staring at the screen.

It just continued to ring, and ring, with no sound of movement from the living room. Newt picked it up gingerly and went over, loudly clearly his throat, hoping that along with the ringing would alert the archangel to his presence. Newt was having trouble calling Gabriel by name; it was just weird. Better to just make inarticulate noises to get his point across.

“For you,” he finally said, holding the phone literally an inch away from the chiselled-from-marble face.

That finally roused him, and Gabriel blinked at the phone in confusion, though in the time between taking the phone and answering it, realization dawned.

“It’s Saturday, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes it’s Saturday!” Crowley’s voice, a continent away, emanated from the speaker. “Where in the damned universe are you?”

Newt quickly retreated, going back to his bedroom, where he began to prod Anathema awake. She groaned, rolling about and tangling herself in the sheets, and giving him a suspicious look. “Have I been possessed again?” she asked, warily.

“No,” he said. “But can you remind me what Crowley told us about Gabriel again?”

“Uhhh,” Anathema, sleepy but with a mind like a notebook, answered foggily. “‘I really hate that twat’?”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he replied. “Anathema, our wedding is going to be _really_ interesting if we manage to survive it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as ever, no beta and no shame!!


End file.
